PITTSBURGH - Carnegie Mellon University signed a three-year research agreement with China's largest steel maker to develop new technology as the global steel industry looks for ways to make metal cheaper and faster.

Under the deal signed Monday, CMU and Shanghai Baosteel Group Corp. will exchange researchers and share ideas for producing sheets of steel in fewer steps, thus saving money, time and energy.

Through an initial funding of $100,000, researchers will study the science of turning molten steel into solid sheets at high speeds while Baosteel plans to send workers to study materials science at the Pittsburgh campus.

Domestic steel industry officials applauded Baosteel for investing in new technologies and cited the agreement as an example that foreign steel makers still look to America for innovative ideas.

"If you look at the last 15 to 18 years, all the major breakthroughs have been developed or implemented here," said Larry Kavanagh, vice president of manufacturing technology at the American Iron and Steel Institute.

During a ceremonial signing Monday, Ai Baojun, president of Baoshan Iron and Steel, a subsidiary of Baosteel, said he hopes the cooperation with CMU will lead to improvements for the company, which had sales of $9.3 billion in 2002, according to the company Web site.

Engineers and industry officials believe a new process, known as strip casting, is a more efficient way of turning liquid metal into solid steel because it eliminates the hot rolling step required to thin the metal. The process, much of it based on principles that Sir Henry Bessemer patented in the 1850s, has only been put to commercial testing in the last 20 years.

Nucor Corp., the Charlotte, N.C.-based steel producer, one of the nation's largest steel minimills, opened one of the world's first commercial strip casting steel plants in 2002 in Crawfordsville, Ind. Nucor partnered with BHP Steel of Australia and IHI of Japan to develop a process patented as Castrip.

"It's relatively new in the world of steel making and I think developments will continue for the next couple of decades," said Richard Wechsler, president of Castrip LLC. "It's not an easy technology and it takes a lot of money."

While other pioneering plants have been built in Europe and Japan, experts say strip casting still needs to be refined. However, some predict it has the potential to revolutionize the steel industry.

Strip casting has proven to produce steel sheets just 1 mm thick, compared with 1½ inches for thin slab casters, Kavanagh said. It's also believed that the process makes steel more tolerant to impure properties like nickel, copper and tin, making it cheaper for steel makers to produce, he said.

"A lot of people are looking at it but they're waiting for the right opportunity," Kavanagh said. "People are just trying to understand what the limits are, what size and what scale."

Alan Cramb, head of CMU's Materials Science and Engineering Department, said the department began exchanging ideas five years ago and was asked to develop research projects for Baosteel. For the first project, CMU researchers will take up the subject of understanding the fundamentals of strip casting.