Event
A. James Clark Distinguished Chair Seminar: Dr. Kazutoshi Ichikawa, Nippon Steel Corporation
Thursday, May 8, 2025
3:30 p.m.
Room 2110 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Suresh Babu
301-405-3637
sbabu123@umd.edu
Development of Highly-Ductile Steel for Ships Ensures Excellent Crashworthiness for Marine Environment Conservation
About the Lecture: Nippon Steel has developed a high-ductility hull steel plate that ensures excellent crashworthiness, aiming at further improving collision safety in order to prevent large-scale oil spills from ships and preserve the marine environment. It has specifically rationalized the ductility target which has a value of a factor of 1.5 to one found in the conventional regulation by applying the nonlinear finite element method and large-scale structural experiments, and it has then established the metallurgical principle for improving the ductility and commercialized the advanced manufacturing procedure and the mass production of the plate. Adopting the highly-ductile plate on the side hull enables vessels like ultra large crude oil carriers to reduce the risk of an oil spill in case of collision. In addition, since the highly-ductile steel plate has the equivalent properties and workability as that of conventional plates including strength, toughness, and weldability, the workload of shipyards does not change. This highly-ductile plate has been adopted in more than sixty-three vessels including eight very large crude oil carriers.
About the Speaker: Kazutoshi Ichikawa is a research scientist with more than 35 years of experience working in the steel industry, including two years of study in Cambridge University. He has successfully developed and commercialized many steel products, including the Highly Ductile Steel Plate (NSafe TM-Hull) for shipbuilding with profound knowledge of materials science and excellent leadership. Dr. Ichikawa also has experience as a chief manager at laboratories working for research planning and coordination. Currently, he is the Chief Manager of the Research Strategy Department in the R&D Planning Division of the Nippon Steel Corporation and a Visiting Professor at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.
NO RSVP REQUIRED.
