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The new solution strengthened ferritic ductile iron grades are well established meanwhile, especially the grade EN-GJS-500-14 is of interest: Compared to the conventional EN-500-7 with same tensile strength, from 320 MPA to 400 MPa raised 0.2%-proof strength and from 7% to 14 % doubled elongation after fracture are very interesting properties of course and the pure ferritic structure promises a better machinability furthermore. Therefore, a customer of us also substituted a part from steel to EN-GJS-500-14. All calculations showed a very good performance of the parts, but as soon as in serial production field damages occurred in a manner that the parts completely broke without advance warning. The investigation of the damages showed, that the parts are not only statically and cyclically loaded, but also by strikes. Deeper investigations about strike loads confirmed, that EN-GJS-500-14 is not really ductile under these conditions. The reflection to the philosophy we had with our SiboDur-700 concept, namely to combine a moderate solid solution strengthening with a moderate strengthening by pearlite with Copper, brought us to a new high strength high ductile material we call SiboDur-500. Same strength as EN-GJS-500-14, 10 % lower in 0.2%-proof stress, slightly lower in elongation after fracture, but double to more than four times energy consumption at strike loads depending on temperature!

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A lot of innovations in molding and casting technology and also simulation techniques have made ductile iron more and more competitive and it even competes meanwhile against steel forgings. A successful substitution of steel forgings for example is the wheel carrier for a high volume car with the Georg Fischer new ductile iron material 'SiboDur', a ductile iron family with high strength and high elongation at the same time. But there is still a great potential for ductile iron castings to substitute steel forgings, in particular in the automotive industry. One example is the crankshaft for the engine: Quite a lot of gasoline engines are equipped with ductile iron crankshafts, but for instance most of the diesel engines are still running with forged steel cranks. The reason is mostly the belief of design engineers that it is not possible to get similar fatigue limit with castings com-pared to forged steel. This belief may often be correct, but using local strengthening technologies, such as roller burnishing of bearing fillets or inductive hardening of highly stressed areas can raise the fatigue limit of casted crankshafts dramatically. The paper presents studies which show that using the right ductile iron material and optimized roller burnishing conditions can raise the fatigue limit of cast crankshafts to values even higher than forged steel ones (material 38MnVS6). But even quenched and tempered forged steel crankshafts are in the focus to be substituted by castings. It is well known that ductile iron also can be induction hardened, but the induction hardening of ductile iron is still an empirical technology. This leads to the second part of the paper: In a cooperation of Georg Fischer and RWP a research project was carried out to develop a simulation technology to predict the residual stresses in a cast crankshaft due to induction hardening under different condi-tions. The results are very encouraging and enable us today to predetermine the induction hardening conditions to get optimized fatigue behavior of ductile iron crankshafts. Of course, the findings can also be used for other applications than crankshafts.

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