Institute of Metallic Material in Railway Transportation (IMMRT)

The Institute of Metallic Material in Railway Transportation (IMMRT) at Beijing Jiaotong University is the railway key material (e.g., rail steel, axis, wheel, et al) R&D center in China, and the leader in bainitic steel and transformation research. IMMRT is one of the main technology service providers to high-speed and heavy haul railway steel R&D, component testing, failure analysis, quality control and auditing, et al, in China. IMMRT was established in May 2013, and together with its predecessor has been advancing the bainite steel and transformation, advanced high strength steels for over 40 years.

IMMRT consists of a group of highly skilled scientists and engineers: one academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, 3 professors, 2 lecturers and one experimentalist. IMMRT is supported by National Key Basic Research Development Plan (973 Plan), Natural Science Foundation of China and mayor project of Ministry of Railways. IMMRT is continuously developing new technologies to support increasing requirement in railway transportation in China, improving the efficiency and safety at the same time as reducing risks and costs.

Research Direction

1) High-performance Metal Materials in Railway Transportation

IMMRT focus on developing advanced bainitic steels for railway transportation through chemical composition design and microstructure controlling. New technologies (eg. controlling the process of phase transformation) used in bainitic rail, wheel and axles are developed and popularized to meet the requirement for high-speed and heavy haul railway. The bainite/martensite multiphase steels have been successfully applied in the frogs and tongue rail. The service life of the bainitic frog is 3 to 5 times longer than that of traditional high manganese frog, which reaches high level at home and abroad.

2) Ultrahigh-strength Bainitic Steel

IMMRT is studying on the application of advanced heat treatments on large-scale steel components with complex shape (e.g., rail and wheel) to control exactly their microstructure and mechanical properties. The newly developed Thermal-Calc, finite element and artificial neural network simulations take part in the process design.

l  Study of advanced heat treatments such as BQ&P and low temperature bainite on CFB/M steels;

l  Realization of on-line heat treatment process;

l  Exactly controlling the multi-phase, multi-size, multi-morphology and metastable (4M) microstructure;

l  Strengthening and toughening mechanism of ultrahigh-strength ductile bainitic steel;

3) New Type Wear-resistant Bainitic Steel

IMMRT is studying on R&D of new type wear-resistant bainitic steels. These steels are applied in the field of slurry transportation. Practice shows that bainitic steels possess excellent wear resistance property that is helpful for improving the lifespan of the pipe used for slurry transportation and reducing overall cost, obviously they have broad application prospect.

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