Patent ID: 7806165

Claim:
A method of making a hot strip, comprising the steps of: providing a melt of a lightweight construction steel with high tensile strength and with TRIP and/or TWIP characteristics, said construction steel comprising Si, Al and Mn as main elements and containing in mass-% C 0.04 to <1.0 Al 0.05 to <4.0 Si 0.05 to <6.0 Mn 9.0 to <30.0, the remainder being iron including incidental steel elements; feeding the melt onto a revolving conveyor band of a horizontal strip casting unit to shape the melt close to a final dimension at calm flow and without bending, thereby forming a shell as the melt progressively solidifies across a width of the conveyor band and producing a pre-strip in the range between 6 and 15 mm; conditioning a top side of the conveyor band by a single-step structuring of the top side to effect same cool-down conditions across a width of the conveyor band; cooling the shell substantially equally across the width of the conveyor band; and transferring the pre-strip for further processing.