Text/Yi Technology
Recently, Huawei released a new machine again after a year, in addition to the P series that the majority of "pollen" is looking forward to, on the night of the 23rd, Huawei also brought the latest folding screen mobile phone - Huawei Mate X3, and the usual release of Huawei folding screen mobile phones, this Mate X3 once launched sold out, Huawei folding screen mobile phone market favor, which can be seen.
Of course, in addition to Huawei, there are many domestic mobile phone brands that have entered the folding screen mobile phone market, including the glory of independence from Huawei a few years ago. When Samsung first released the folding screen mobile phone Galaxy Fold, many domestic consumers were shocked, but also wondered, when will the domestic brand also be able to launch its own folding screen mobile phone?
Unexpectedly, less than 1 week later, the domestic Huawei released the folding screen mobile phone Mate X, followed by Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo also released their own folding screen mobile phones in turn.
Admittedly, including Honor President Zhao Ming, and other industry insiders believe that in the field of mobile phone folding screens, the most difficult is hinges and flexible OLED screens, but what is less known is that behind the endless emergence of domestic folding screen mobile phones, there is a core technology that supports folding screen mobile phones to achieve arbitrary bending and normal use, and it is precisely because of the mainland's breakthrough in this technology that domestic folding screen mobile phones are exempted from the neck of foreign technology, and this technology is hand-torn steel.
Hand-torn steel power folding screen mobile phone
Hand-torn steel is a very thin steel product, the scientific name is stainless steel foil, it fully exerts the ductility of the metal to the extreme, so that it can be thin enough to be easily torn by hand, and the name "hand-torn steel" is also derived.
Compared with traditional steel, hand-torn steel is much thinner, and the most cutting-edge hand-torn steel in mainland China is only 0.015 mm, which is only a quarter of the thickness of A4 paper. As you can imagine, this hand-torn steel has very high requirements for manufacturing process and technology. In order to manufacture qualified hand-torn steel, it is necessary to overcome the four technical problems of rolling, annealing, high-grade surface control and performance control, and in the manufacturing process, the most likely and most common problem is the belt breakage, that is, when forging the stainless steel foil raw materials, there are often temperature, forging strength, metal alloy ratio and other reasons, causing the pressure to exceed the degree of metal material elongation, resulting in steel fracture, unable to form completely.
Perhaps many people will ask, why make this metal so thin, is it good to be enough? In fact, the reason why hand-torn steel is getting thinner and thinner, and it must maintain the corresponding strength, naturally has its own unique use. Initially, hand-torn steel was first used in the aerospace sector as a heat shield in the combustion chamber of an aero-engine. As we all know, the requirements of materials in the aviation field, the first consideration is weight, naturally the lighter the better, so under the premise of ensuring strength, the steel needs to be made as thin as possible. In addition, in many fields, such as missile guidance radar, and military anti-jamming radar, hand-torn steel has a very important use.
In addition, with the increase in the production of hand-torn steel, many civil fields have also begun to widely use hand-torn steel, among which new energy photovoltaic materials, solar power panels, protective clothing, and medical equipment are all large users of hand-torn steel. In recent years, with the proposal of the concept of flexible screens, relevant researchers have found that to ensure the conductivity of flexible screens in any folded state, it is necessary to use more flexible and lightweight metal materials, of course, mercury is flexible enough but unlikely to be applied to mobile phones and other terminal electronic products, so the industry has focused on hand-torn steel, so there is also the folding screen mobile phone that everyone sees.
Break the foreign monopoly, domestic hand-torn steel against the trend
However, the technology of hand-torn steel has long been monopolized by Japan and Germany, with many years of exploration and development in the field of cutting-edge industry, Japan and Germany have mastered a complete hand-torn steel forging and preparation process, not only for the technical process three silent, in the export of hand-torn steel finished products is sitting on the ground starting price, fighting for odd goods, for the sale of hand-torn steel to the mainland, Germany and Japan as soon as they open their mouths are asking for millions of dollars a meal, on average, equivalent to an A4 paper size of hand-torn steel, it takes more than 400 yuan. There is no doubt that this is to cut us like leeks.
However, with the development of the domestic economy and industry, the market demand for hand-torn steel continues to expand, and the annual cost of imported hand-torn steel in the mainland is as high as tens of billions of yuan, so many people of insight in China have begun to invest in domestic hand-torn steel research in the hope of breaking foreign monopoly.
When the clock turned back to 2016, Taiyuan Iron and Steel Group decided to overcome the problem of hand-torn steel, but at that time, there was a complete blank in hand-torn steel manufacturing technology in China, and there was no experience to follow. Therefore, the technicians of Taiyuan Iron and Steel decided to use a variety of rolling rods to "roll" the steel into a thin tenths of a millimeter like rolling dough, obviously, this is not so easy, because the steel is rolled very thin, and then want to make it further exert ductility to become thinner, when the pressure further increases, the steel is extremely easy to break, forming a fracture.
If you want to "roll" the steel into hand-torn steel, you must understand what the appropriate pressure is and what is the alloy ratio corresponding to the steel, otherwise, "rolling" out of the hand-torn steel is simply impossible to talk about. So the Taiyuan steel team adjusted the arrangement of the rolls of the "rolling" steel, and finally found the most suitable strength for the "rolling" steel from tens of thousands of arrangement orders, and in the long research and development process, the R & D team did more than 700 experiments and overcome 172 equipment problems and 452 process problems. Finally, in 2018, Taiyuan Iron and Steel Group successfully developed hand-torn steel with a thickness of 0.02 mm and a width of 600 mm, completely solving the problem of foreign sky-high imported hand-torn steel.
After reaching the international advanced level, TISCO people did not become complacent, let alone stand still, but quickly plunged into more advanced hand-torn steel research, relying on the "toughness" and "brutality" all along, soon TISCO research team broke through 0.015 mm thickness of hand-torn steel, and the mainland also has the world's most advanced hand-torn steel technology.
Looking back, why can't the United States kill Huawei? Because Huawei has a strong China behind it as a "backer"! Loaded with the continent is also the world's most advanced 0.015mm Huawei Mate X3 folding screen mobile phone, the number of stable folding can exceed 200,000 times, can perfectly achieve no deformation, no breaking, and the service life can reach 10 years. When we proudly pick up this Huawei machine emperor and are impressed by its sci-fi folding screen, we should also know that Huawei's success is inseparable from the unremitting efforts of domestic basic material research manufacturers such as TISCO, and it is precisely because of their efforts that China's manufacturing can have today's glory.