The key activities of this group are Product Development and Product Application. These activities can be categorized broadly into following three areas:

• Flat Products including Tubes – research, design and development of new steel grades and improvement of existing grades produced from Hot Strip Mill, Cold Rolling Mill, Tubes and Thin Slab Caster

• Long Products including wires – research, design and development of new steel grades for the production of Rebars, Wire Rods and Wires

• Automotive applications – research and technical support in the areas of forming, tube hydroforming and the development of advanced material models.

The group has core competence in thermodynamics, alloy design, experimental and computational phase transformation, advanced microstructural characterization, hot deformation, soft computational techniques, recrystallization, texture, sheet metal forming and experimental and computational plasticity.

Since its inception, this group with support from other departments, has enabled the Company to launch many new steel grades such as Extra Deep Drawing (EDD), Interstitial Free (IF), IF-High Strength (IF-HS), Ultra low carbon (ULC)-Bake Hardening (BH), non-earing Isotropic grade, various semi-processed CRNO (Cold Rolled Non-Oriented) electrical grades, Ferrite-Bainite (FB) 590, Tata 600, Tata 800, tyre bead wires with improved bend properties, low relaxation LRPC wires, etc. To meet future market requirements and provide competitive edge to the company, the group is involved two thrust area projects on new generation advanced high strength steels and wires.

In the areas of automotive applications and customer technical support, the group is involved in basic and applied application research. The group works with different auto customers from the vehicle concept stage itself. As part of the customer technical support, the group has worked with almost all the automotive manufacturers and OEMs in India. Advanced research work also includes the development of an advanced material model for better formability and springback prediction and the development of material characterization techniques for non-proportional deformation conditions.