In the face of the financial crisis, the State Council adopted the “Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Equipment Manufacturing Industry” as the key content of upgrading the technical level of molds and their manufacturing equipment, and related mold project items in the national 16 major science and technology specialties basic equipment functional parts projects. It also reflects the important position of the mold industry in the manufacturing industry. Luo Baihui, a senior expert in the industry, believes that the central government's stimulus plan to boost domestic demand has also brought opportunities to the mold market in trouble.

How to seize the business opportunities of the 4 trillion yuan total investment in construction projects and turn them into real orders for the mold industry? Luo Baihui believes that in the face of unprecedented opportunities, the most basic problem in the development of China's mold industry is to solve the backward status of mold materials and mold-related technologies.

New Opportunities Bring New Challenges According to Li Guangchao, an expert from the International Steel Association's Steel Committee, the performance, quality, and types of mold materials often affect the quality, life, and cost of molds. Compared with foreign imported steels, domestic mold steels are both quality and variety specifications. There is a big gap. Taking the automotive mold as an example, the rapid development of China's automobile industry and mold industry put forward higher and newer requirements on the quantity, quality, variety, and performance of mold materials. For example, users of high-standard mold steel materials require very good impact. Toughness, residual element control, high quality, long life, etc. Because of the variety, specification, quality and performance of the domestic steel, there is still a certain gap between it and the international advanced level, leading to 25% of China's annual high-grade mold must be imported from abroad.

According to Wang Jinling, Deputy Secretary General of the International Association for Modeling, a car from microelectronic components to bodywork, tires, etc., consists of plastics, glass, copper, aluminum, steel and other components of various strengths and surface states, and any one of these auto parts In the production process, if the physical properties and appearance quality of each component are required to fully meet the design requirements, the quality of the mold must be guaranteed. The user of the mold firstly requires that the mold must not completely fail, that is, the mold must not be cracked as a whole. Second, the mold user requires that the first and last auto parts have the same physical properties, appearance, and dimensional tolerances, so the mold material must ensure sufficient strength.

Wang Jinling stated that with the development of lightweight vehicles, the production of die castings tends to use higher pressure, more automatic die Casting machines to produce, and therefore, the working conditions of the die are getting worse, which requires that the die materials have excellent red at the same time. Hard (high temperature yield strength) and ductility (plasticity).

Zhou Desheng, deputy general manager of the Dongguan Center of the National Mould Key Laboratory, believes that tool steel is indeed a problem for mold makers, especially for large and medium mold manufacturers. For example, the die steels of large modules have low selectability and reliability of domestic die steels and cannot meet the time-critical requirements. Therefore, die makers have to use imported die steels with higher costs.

Die steel urgently needs to be localized in the face of a huge market that has just emerged, and domestic steel companies are full of emotion and guilt: At present, domestic mold steel can not fully meet the needs of the domestic mold industry. According to the person in charge of the Mold Materials Committee of the China Die & Mould Industry Association, the domestic mold steel market has lagged behind the development of the mold industry, and it is still not well adapted to the needs of the mold manufacturing industry, mainly in the following aspects:

The first is that the production process of die steel is backward and the quality of steel is poor. For example, the intrinsic quality of domestic common mold steel h13, d2, ld and other varieties can reach the American mold steel general standard astma681, which is an international standard and can basically meet the needs of general mold users at home and abroad. However, the high requirements imposed on users of high-standard die steels, such as impact toughness, residual elemental control of carbides, and high-quality long-life requirements, cannot be satisfied at present. For example, cold work tool steels require various properties such as wear resistance, plastic deformation resistance, chipping resistance, crack resistance of the entire part, machinability, and grindability under low temperature conditions. The plastic mold steel requires a high surface finish, corrosion resistance, wear resistance, high thermal conductivity, machinability, polishing, etching properties.

Wang Jinling, deputy secretary-general of the International Modeling Association, said that the service life of quenched steel molds in foreign countries is 160 to 3 million times, and that of domestic ones is only 500,000 to 1 million times. The life of unquenched steel molds is also only half that of foreign countries. Steel quality is one of the reasons for this. In addition, there are few new types of domestic mold steels. In recent years, some well-known foreign mold steel production companies have developed many new mold steel products, such as high strength and toughness mold steel, dh13, dh53, flame quenching mold steel, powder metallurgy cold mold steel, etc. These high-performance mold steel has become the current international Typical brand products for the mold market. In contrast, there are few new high-performance mold steels made in China, and there are few new steel molds developed.

There is not a complete variety of specifications. For example, plastic mold steel, which accounts for 60% of the amount of mold steel, has only two steel grades in China's alloy tool steel standards, while the United States has seven steel grades and forms a complete series of steel products. Countries such as the United States, Japan, France, and Switzerland have formed series in cold work die steels and hot work die steels, and only hot work die steels have six fixed common types, which are less than that of home-made die steels.