Shape and surface
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In principle, steel is formed into either flat products or long products, both of which have either a hot-rolled, cold-formed, or coated surface.
Flat products
Flat products include plates, hot-rolled strip and sheets, and cold-rolled strip and sheets; all have a great variety of surface conditions. They are rolled from slabs, which are considered a semifinished product and are normally not sold. Provided by either a continuous caster or rolled from ingots by a slabbing mill, slabs are 50 to 250 millimetres thick, 0.6 to 2.6 metres wide, and up to 12 metres long (that is, 2 to 10 inches thick, 24 to 104 inches wide, and up to 40 feet long).
Plates are hot-rolled either from slabs or directly from ingots. Maximum dimensions vary with available slab sizes or ingot weights and with the sizes of installed rolling mills and auxiliary equipment. Thickness can be as low as 5 millimetres, but it is usually heavier (e.g., 25 millimetres) and can go as high as 200 millimetres. The width of plates is usually between 1.5 to 3.5 metres, but there are plants that can roll plates up to 5.5 metres wide. The maximum plate length that the largest mills can produce is 35 metres. Plates are usually made in small quantities and to a customer’s specification, with different dimensions and tolerances for flatness, profile, straightness, and other properties. The edges can be ordered in either as-rolled condition or sheared, machined, or gas-cut. Plates are also sometimes cladded with corrosion-resistant sheets.
Hot-rolled strip is often shipped directly from the hot-strip mill in a large coil weighing 10 to 35 tons. Its thickness is 1.5 to 12 millimetres, and its width, depending on the available mill, is 0.7 to 2 metres. Frequently, the large coils are slit into narrower coils or edge trimmed, or they are cut to length into sheets at the finishing section of a steel plant or at a service centre. Coils and sheets are shipped either with the hot-rolled surface or with the scale removed and the surface oiled.
Cold-rolled strip, produced from hot-rolled strip, is 0.1 to 2 millimetres thick and also up to 2 metres wide, depending on a shop’s facilities. Steel plants supply this product in coils or sheets, the latter being cut on special shear lines. Cold-rolled products are available in a great variety of surface conditions, often with a specific roughness, electrolytically cleaned, chemically treated, oiled, or coated with metals such as zinc, tin, chromium, and aluminum or with organic substances. They are usually produced to strict dimensional tolerances in order to assure efficient performance in the highly demanding operations of automated consumer-products industries.
Long products
Long products are made of either blooms or billets, which are, like slabs, considered a semifinished product and are cast by a continuous caster or rolled at a blooming mill. Billets have a cross section 50 to 125 millimetres square, and blooms are 125 to 400 millimetres square. In practice, they are not precisely distinguished by these dimensions, and there is considerable overlap in the use of the two terms.
Long products include bars, rods and wires, structural shapes and rails, and tubes. Bars are long products with square, rectangular, flat, round, hexagonal, or octagonal cross sections. The most important bar products are the rounds, which can reach a diameter of 250 millimetres. They are sometimes cold-drawn or even ground to very precise dimensions for use in machine parts. A special group of rounds are the reinforcing bars. Produced in diameters of 10 to 50 millimetres, they provide tensile strength to concrete sections subjected to a bending load. They normally have hot-rolled protrusions on their surface to improve bonding with concrete. Some bar mills also produce small channels, angles, tees, zees, and fence-post sections, with a maximum flange length of 75 millimetres, and call these products merchant bars.
Hot-rolled wire rods are produced in diameters between 5.5 and 12.5 millimetres and are shipped in coils weighing up to two tons. A great portion of these rods are cold-drawn into wire, which is often covered afterward by a metallic coating for corrosion protection. The use of wire is extremely wide, ranging from cords for belted tires to cables for suspension bridges.
The common structural shapes are wide flange I-beams, standard I-beams, channels, angles, tees, zees, H-pilings, and sheet pilings. All these shapes are standardized, and each company has price lists showing which sections are produced and in which quality and length they can be supplied. Railroad rails are always produced to national standards. In the United States, for example, there are rails weighing 115, 132, and 140 pounds per yard and cut to lengths of 39 or 78 feet. There are also a great number of special rails—e.g., for cranes and heavy transfer cars or for use in mines and construction.
Tubular steels are broadly grouped into welded and seamless products. Longitudinally welded tubes are normally produced up to 500 millimetres in diameter and 10 millimetres in wall thickness. Pipes produced from heavy plates are also longitudinally welded after being formed in a U-ing and O-ing operation; they can be 0.8 to 2 metres in diameter, with wall thicknesses up to 180 millimetres. Spiral-welded pipes are sometimes produced in diameters up to 1.5 metres. Seamless tubes are subjected to more demanding service; they are often rolled in diameters ranging from 120 to 400 millimetres and in wall thicknesses up to 15 millimetres, although special rolling mills can often increase the diameter to 650 millimetres. Smaller diameter tubes, both welded and seamless, can be produced by reduction mills or cold-drawing benches. Tubes are frequently machined on both ends for various coupling systems and coated with organic material.
Standards
Specifications for steel products as well as testing procedures are normally included in the general standard systems of most industrial countries. Institutions providing these standards are the American Society for Testing and Materials, Philadelphia; British Standards Institute, London; Deutsches Institut für Normung, Berlin; Japanese Industrial Standards Committee, Tokyo; Comité Européen de Normalisation, Brussels; and International Organization for Standardization, Geneva.
There are also product manuals published by a number of associations and societies, sometimes for special products only, that are often used as standards in technical specifications and commercial agreements. Organizations that issue these include the American Iron and Steel Institute, Washington, D.C.; Society of Automotive Engineers, Warrendale, Pennsylvania.; American Petroleum Institute, Washington, D.C.; and American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York City.
Each steel producer publishes lists showing the steel grades and dimensions that it can deliver. Special alloys and coatings are often supplied under a company-owned trademark. There are also publications that provide cross-references for similar steel grades among the various standards and trademarks issued in different countries.
Primary steelmaking
Principles
In principle, steelmaking is a melting, purifying, and alloying process carried out at approximately 1,600° C (2,900° F) in molten conditions. Various chemical reactions are initiated, either in sequence or simultaneously, in order to arrive at specified chemical compositions and temperatures. Indeed, many of the reactions interfere with one another, requiring the use of process models to help in analyzing options, optimizing competing reactions, and designing efficient commercial practices.
Raw materials
The major iron-bearing raw materials for steelmaking are blast-furnace iron, steel scrap, and direct-reduced iron (DRI). Liquid blast-furnace iron typically contains 3.8 to 4.5 percent carbon (C), 0.4 to 1.2 percent silicon (Si), 0.6 to 1.2 percent manganese (Mn), up to 0.2 percent phosphorus (P), and 0.04 percent sulfur (S). Its temperature is usually 1,400° to 1,500° C (2,550° to 2,700° F). The phosphorus content depends on the ore used, since phosphorus is not removed in the blast-furnace process, whereas sulfur is usually picked up during iron making from coke and other fuels. DRI is reduced from iron ore in the solid state by carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2). It frequently contains about 3 percent unreduced iron ore and 4 percent gangue, depending on the ore used. It is normally shipped in briquettes and charged into the steelmaking furnace like scrap. Steel scrap is metallic iron containing residuals, such as copper, tin, and chromium, that vary with its origin. Of the three major steelmaking processes—basic oxygen, open hearth, and electric arc—the first two, with few exceptions, use liquid blast-furnace iron and scrap as raw material and the latter uses a solid charge of scrap and DRI.
Oxidation reactions
The most important chemical reactions carried out on these materials (especially on blast-furnace iron) are the oxidation of carbon to carbon monoxide, silicon to silica, manganese to manganous oxide, and phosphorus to phosphate, as follows:
Unfortunately, iron is also lost in this series of reactions, as it is oxidized to ferrous oxide:
The FeO, absorbed into the liquid slag, then acts as an oxidizer itself, as in the following reactions:
In the open-hearth furnace, oxidation also takes place when gases containing carbon dioxide (CO2) contact the melt and react as follows:
The slag
The products of the above reactions, the oxides silica, manganese oxide, phosphate, and ferrous oxide, together with burnt lime (calcium oxide; CaO) added as flux, form the slag. Burnt lime has by itself a high melting point of 2,570° C (4,660° F) and is therefore solid at steelmaking temperatures, but when it is mixed with the other oxides, they all melt together at lower temperatures and thus form the slag. A basic slag contains approximately 55 percent CaO, 15 percent SiO2, 5 percent MnO, 18 percent FeO, and other oxides plus sulfides and phosphates. The basicity of a slag is often simply expressed by the ratio of CaO to SiO2, with CaO being the basic and SiO2 the acidic component. Usually, a basicity above 3.5 provides good absorption and holding capacity for calcium phosphates and calcium sulfides.
Removing sulfur
The majority of sulfur, present as ferrous sulfide (FeS), is removed from the melt not by oxidation but by the conversion of calcium oxide to calcium sulfide:
FeS + CaO → CaS + FeO.
According to this equation, desulfurization is successful only when using a slag with plenty of calcium oxide—in other words, with a high basicity. A low iron oxide content is also essential, since oxygen and sulfur compete to combine with the calcium. For this reason, many steel plants desulfurize blast-furnace iron before it is refined into steel, since at that stage it contains practically no dissolved oxygen, owing to its high silicon and carbon content. Nevertheless, sulfur is often introduced by scrap and flux during steelmaking, so that, in order to meet low sulfur specifications (for example, less than 0.008 percent), it is necessary to desulfurize the steel as well.
Removing carbon
A very important chemical reaction during steelmaking is the oxidation of carbon. Its gaseous product, carbon monoxide, goes into the off-gas, but, before it does that, it generates the carbon monoxide boil, a phenomenon common to all steelmaking processes and very important for mixing. Mixing enhances chemical reactions, purges hydrogen and nitrogen, and improves heat transfer. Adjusting the carbon content is important, but it is often oxidized below specified levels, so that carbon powder must be injected to raise the carbon again.
