100 years of stainless steel manufacturing Process
Stainless steel was a decent complement to Sandvik's line of
business at the time. The steel laboratory was enlarged to organize for the new
steel grades along side different production investments. A amount of growth and
investments followed.
In 1930, the steel mill's cold-rolling operations were
utterly remodeled, within and out. Even a sintering plant and new electrical
arc furnaces were discovered. This became the breakthrough of stainless-steel.
At this time, within the early Nineteen Thirties, Sandvik
had thirty completely different grades of stainless-steel in production. In
1932, Sandvik nonheritable AN exclusive Nordic license associated with cold
rolling of steel tubes victimisation the pilgering technique for sixty,000
greenbacks. This method, any developed by Sandvik's metallurgists, created it
attainable to scale back each the outer diameter and therefore the thickness of
the tube material in an exceedingly single rolling operation. This meant a
major rationalization as a result of one operation may replace many cold
drawings within the earlier technique, and therefore the ensuing quality was
even higher.
"Even tho' we've got progressive the instrumentation
from those days, and another processes like continuous casting and extrusion, a
number of the basic processes like pilgering, block rolling and shaping area
unit the same", says Tom Eriksson, VP & Head of Strategic analysis at
Sandvik Materials Technology.
"Today, we've got some 900 completely different active
stainless-steel recipes in our library, though several of them area unit
varieties with minor variations, and not all area unit liquid on an everyday
basis. in an exceedingly traditional year, we have a tendency to turn out
roughly two hundred completely different alloys in our soften shop", he
says.
Sandvik Materials Technology is nowadays most renowned for
its advanced duplex unstained steels, that's a steel with a combined
ferritic-austenitic structure that performs well in any application as well as
chlorides. These area unit usually alloyed in an exceedingly manner that
produces them quite troublesome to supply and heat-treat.