POSCO has broken ground for another electrical steel plant. South Korea’s top steelmaker will spend 1 trillion won (US$805 million) in building the plant in the southwestern port of Gwangyang, which will have an annual production capacity of 300,000 tons of non-oriented electrical steel.
Electrical steels (earlier post) are special steels optimized for specific magnetic properties, including a small hysteresis area for low power loss per cycle, low core loss and high permeability. Electrical steels are found throughout a modern vehicle—from the small motors which drive mirrors and seats to the larger machines that are used in the propulsion systems of hybrid or full EVs. Traction motors and generators in those alternative drive trains are particularly dependent on highly efficient electrical steels.
The commercial electrical steel market is divided in two major categories: the grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES) market and the non-oriented electrical steel (NOES) market. GOES is used in static machinery such as transformers, which require unidirectional magnetization, while NOES is used in rotating machinery such as motors and generators, which require multidirectional magnetization.
NOES is a direct material input used in electric motor manufacturing for both hybrid and electric vehicles.