H2SteeLab
By joining our hydrogen activities in the H2SteeLab project, we are emphasizing our steel expertise in this area. We are currently extending our laboratories with a focus on testing material integrity, steel surfaces and other requirements in the field of compressed gaseous hydrogen gas and other hydrogen storage media.
Our hydrogen team combines know-how and experience in the interaction of hydrogen and steel with comprehensive technical expertise. It is the foundation for hydrogen-specific collaboration across the entire company site.
The hydrogen laboratory
In our new hydrogen laboratory, we will bundle all our tests under hydrogen gas or hydrogen gas mixtures up to 400 bar. In particular, fracture mechanics tests with cyclic loading and with measurement recording on the sample will be a new addition.
The building permits have been granted and ground preparation has begun.
At two locations, we work for the corporate affiliates of Salzgitter AG as well as for customers in the steel processing industry, the automotive industry, machinery and plant construction, energy technology and the construction industry.
Our R&D processes are oriented towards the key steps of steel production and subsequent processing. Some 300 extremely well-trained employees work with a full spectrum of state-of-the-art technical equipment and testing laboratories.
Thanks to this interdisciplinary team and 90 years of experience, we continue to develop products and processes with a view to the future. We accompany these developments and optimizations from laboratory experiments and numerical simulations along the entire process chain to implementation in operations. In addition to product qualification and technical advice on materials, design and standards, our services also include innovation management, patent analyses and advanced analytics.
There’s a lot to do, after all the potential of steel as a material is far from exhausted.
The concept for a sustainable future
Our program SALCOS®
With SALCOS® (Salzgitter Low CO2 Steelmaking), Salzgitter AG has laid the foundations for a virtually CO2-free steel production together with partners from industry and research. Central elements of the program are electricity from renewable sources and its use in the production of hydrogen by means of electrolysis. This green hydrogen will replace the coal that we currently use in the conventional blast furnace process. This will be possible with the help of so-called direct reduction plants, in which iron ore is reduced to iron directly in its solid-state using hydrogen. With this technology, water vapor is emitted instead of CO2.
Our SALCOS® program pursues the Carbon Direct Avoidance Strategie, wich stands for avoiding the generation of CO2 in steel production from the outset. Overall, Salzgitter AG will be enabled to reduce its CO2 emissions by over 95 %.
All informationen on the SALCOS® program can be found on the dedicated microsite