Manufacturing And Application Of Stainless Steels

Stainless steels represent a quite interesting material family, both from a scientific and commercial point of view, following to their excellent combination in terms of strength and ductility together with corrosion resistance. Thanks to such properties, stainless steels have been indispensable for the technological progress during the last century and their annual consumption increased faster than other materials. They find application in all these fields requiring good corrosion resistance together with ability to be worked into complex geometries. Despite to their diffusion as a consolidated materials, many research fields are active regarding the possibility to increase stainless steels mechanical properties and corrosion resistance by grain refinement or by alloying by interstitial elements. At the same time innovations are coming from the manufacturing process of such a family of materials, also including the possibility to manufacture them starting from metals powder for 3D printing. The Special Issue scope embraces interdisciplinary work covering physical metallurgy and processes, reporting about experimental and theoretical progress concerning microstructural evolution during processing, microstructure-properties relations, applications including automotive, energy and structural.

Stainless steels represent a quite interesting material family, both from a scientific and commercial point of view, following to their excellent combination in terms of strength and ductility together with corrosion resistance. Thanks to such properties, stainless steels have been indispensable for the technological progress during the last century and their annual consumption increased faster than other materials. They find application in all these fields requiring good corrosion resistance together with ability to be worked into complex geometries. Despite to their diffusion as a consolidated materials, many research fields are active regarding the possibility to increase stainless steels mechanical properties and corrosion resistance by grain refinement or by alloying by interstitial elements. At the same time innovations are coming from the manufacturing process of such a family of materials, also including the possibility to manufacture them starting from metals powder for 3D printing. The Special Issue scope embraces interdisciplinary work covering physical metallurgy and processes, reporting about experimental and theoretical progress concerning microstructural evolution during processing, microstructure-properties relations, applications including automotive, energy and structural.

Designed as a basic and introductory reference, this book not only addresses stainless steels in the light of their resistance to corrosion for which they are more commonly recognised, but also explains the wide range of other useful properties attributable to the various and specific categories of these alloys. This book is a concise, easy-to-read introduction to one of the most widely used industrial materials. Each chapter explains an important concept related to the selection, application, processing and use of stainless steels. This book is indexed and includes appendices: (1) Identification of Stainless Steels in Service (2) Toxicity of Stainless Steel (3) Table of Equivalent Designations (this is not intended to be complete, but includes the more commonly used stainless steels and the most widely used designation systems). First published in 1965 and updated in 1986, this third edition is a completely new text.

Materials science is the magic that allows us to change the chemical composition and microstructure of material to regulate its corrosion-mechanical, technological, and functional properties. Five major classes of stainless steels are widely used: ferritic, austenitic, martensitic, duplex, and precipitation hardening. Austenitic stainless steels are extensively used for service down to as low as the temperature of liquid helium (-269oC). This is largely due to the lack of a clearly defined transition from ductile to brittle fracture in impact toughness testing. Steels with ferritic or martensitic structures show a sudden change from ductile (safe) to brittle (unsafe) fracture over a small temperature difference. Even the best of these steels shows this behavior at temperatures higher than -100oC and in many cases only just below zero. Various types of stainless steel are used across the whole temperature range from ambient to 1100oC. This book will be useful to scientists, engineers, masters, graduate students, and students. I hope readers will enjoy this book and that it will serve to create new materials with unique properties.

Duplex Stainless Steels (DSSs) are chromium-nickel-molybdenum-iron alloys that are usually in proportions optimized for equalizing the volume fractions of austenite and ferrite. Due to their ferritic-austenitic microstructure, they possess a higher mechanical strength and a better corrosion resistance than standard austenitic steels. This type of steel is now increasing its application and market field due to its very good properties and relatively low cost. This book is a review of the most recent progress achieved in the last 10 years on microstructure, corrosion resistance and mechanical strength properties, as well as applications, due to the development of new grades. Special attention will be given to fatigue and fracture behavior and to proposed models to account for mechanical behavior. Each subject will be developed in chapters written by experts recognized around the international industrial and scientific communities. The use of duplex stainless steels has grown rapidly in the last 10 years, particularly in the oil and gas industry, chemical tankers, pulp and paper as well as the chemical industry. In all these examples, topics like welding, corrosion resistance and mechanical strength properties (mainly in the fatigue domain) are crucial. Therefore, the update of welding and corrosion properties and the introduction of topics like texture effects, fatigue and fracture strength properties, and mechanical behavior modeling give this book specific focus and character.

The rate of growth of stainless steel has outpaced that of other metals and alloys, and by 2010 may surpass aluminum as the second most widely used metal after carbon steel. The 2007 world production of stainless steel was approximately 30,000,000 tons and has nearly doubled in the last ten years. This growth is occurring at the same time that the production of stainless steel continues to become more consolidated. One result of this is a more widespread need to understand stainless steel with fewer resources to provide that information. The concurrent technical evolution in stainless steel and increasing volatility of raw material prices has made it more important for the engineers and designers who use stainless steel to make sound technical judgments about which stainless steels to use and how to use them.