New Developments In High Strength Stainless Steels

This report presents information on the physical metallurgy, chemical composition, mechanical and physical properties, corrosion resistance, fabrication, and cleaning of several of the newer high-strength stainless steels. The alloys covered include one semiaustenitic precipitation-hardenable stainless steel, PH14-8Mo, and the following martensitic precipitation- hardenable stainless steels: PH13-8Mo, 15-5PH, Custom 455, AM-363, AM-362, and AFC-77. Also included is 17-4PH as a sheet and strip product.

"Stainless Steels: An Introduction and Their Recent Developments explains issues related to surface treatment, grain refinement, coloration, defect detection and powder metallurgy of stainless steels in detail with reference to new research findings. It al"

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.

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.