Washington, Aug 25 (IANS): Chinese scientists said on Thursday they have developed a super steel that has a high level of both strength and ductility, a breakthrough that may have a wide variety of industrial applications.

Furthermore, its material cost is just one-fifth of that of the steel used in the current aerospace and defence applications, they reported in the US journal Science, Xinhua news agency reported.

Strength and ductility are desirable properties of metallic materials for wide-ranging applications, but increasing strength often leads to the decrease in ductility, which is known as the strength-ductility trade-off.

A Hong Kong-Beijing-Taiwan mechanical engineering team led by Huang Mingxin from the University of Hong Kong adopted a new manufacturing technique called deformed and partitioned (D&P) to addressed the problem.

"Steels have been the most widely used metallic materials in the history of mankind and can be produced with much higher efficiency than any other metallic materials," the team was quoted as syaing.

"Therefore developing a strong and ductile breakthrough steel has been a long quest since the beginning of Iron Age in mankind history."

According to the team, the "breakthrough steel" belongs to the system of so-called medium manganese steel that contains 10 per cent manganese, 0.47 per cent carbon, 2.0 per cent aluminium and 0.7 per cent vanadium.