China's die steel industry is still out of the vicious circle of being big but not strong

With the continuous development of my country's mold industry, the import volume of high-grade mold steel continues to rise, and it is expected that the import of mold steel will also increase significantly, especially the pattern of mold steel imports in the mold cavity is difficult to change in a short period of time. The import of mold steel mainly comes from Japan, Germany, Sweden, Austria, South Korea and other countries. Compared with the international advanced level of Sweden, Germany, the United States, Japan, and France, the domestic alloy die steel currently has a certain gap in terms of variety, quality, size and performance, and it is difficult to meet the high-end market demand. Die steel basically consists of three series of hot work die steel, cold work die steel and plastic die steel. There is a surplus of ordinary die steel in my country, but there is still a big gap between high-end, precision and long-life high-quality die steel and foreign countries, mainly in the purity index. According to Luo Baihui, Secretary General of the International Mold Association, China has about 20% of the annual share, about 100,000 tons, and the high-quality mold steel with a contract of 6 billion yuan needs to be imported, which almost occupies the entire high-end market of mold steel. Moreover, the price of imported die steel is several times or ten times higher than that of domestic similar products. Generally, the life of domestic H13 steel die-casting molds is 30,000 to 50,000 times, while the life of imported high-quality H13 steel die-casting molds can reach 200,000 times. The main reason is that foreign die steel adopts the single indicators of quality purity, annealing structure and impact toughness, and the steel quality is uniform, the structure is small, and the size is accurate. Production practice has proved that the growing scale of China's die steel industry is still not out of the 'big but not strong' vicious circle. Although my country also has a series of mold materials, there are many repeated steel types, coarse classification, small batches, poor stability of steel quality, and without the reliability of steel, there are concerns for mold companies to choose. There is still a certain gap between my country's die steel and the international advanced die steel production level in terms of variety, specification, quality and performance. Restricted the development of mold enterprises. Luo Baihui believes that my country should increase the research on the basic theory and application of surface treatment, and adopt advanced equipment and technology to hope that various types of high-quality surface treatment will be widely used in molds. With the variety of mold products, the working conditions of the mold are complicated, and the rational selection of materials is more important and urgent. Therefore, it is urgent to establish an expert system for mold material selection.