Nickel as an Alternative Automotive Body Material

The study of the thermal, chemical and mechanical properties of pure nickel as an alternative automotive body material is presented in this paper. Current automotive components mainly use steel as the body material. Due to the increasing demand for high performance and related issues, interest is moving towards alternative materials to steel. The hardness values of both heat-treated and non-heat treated pure nickel do not change after annealing; the hardness values are in the range of 118 to 123 HV. As the annealing temperature increases, the ultimate tensile strength, yield strength and Young’s modulus decrease, which indicates that the ductility increases. The highest ultimate tensile strength of pure nickel at 300 °C annealed temperature is 758.78 MPa. X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies confirmed pure nickel as a face centred cubic (FCC) structure with a lattice constant measured as 0.3492 nm for the unannealed sample, which increases to 0.3512 nm for the annealed samples. The corrosion rate of both annealed and non-heat treated pure nickel is in the range of 0.0266 to 0.048 mm/year.