The Fundamental Things Apply

We agree! That famous song tells us, “The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.” We really believe that. But we know that sometimes it is too easy to race ahead of ourselves and leave the fundamentals unspoken. Well, no more. We are creating a new series of deep dives into topics that are relevant for anybody manufacturing steel components. We call this series “Fundamentals of…”.

Within Ovako we have a lot of historical and new knowledge on steel topics that will never cease to be important: heat treatment, welding, machining, wear resistance, quantifying steel cleanness and many others. What we have now set out to do is to share this knowledge in a more systematic and well-presented way. This is designed to complement the information we have already made available in our Steel Navigator.

The Steel Navigator contains a number of interactive tools that can save design and manufacturing engineers lots of time and provide new insights. It brings together our modularized Material Data Sheets, our Heat Treatment Guide, the M-Steel Calculator and a Piston Rod Predictor. In addition, we also have a document library where we share a number of other Knowledge Tools as well as useful links to external knowledge sites.

The latest additions are the first two instalments in our “Fundamentals of…” series: Heat Treatment of Steel and Welding Steel. Please visit our Steel Navigator to see how the series is presented.

Heat Treatment of Steel

Heat treatment is a process that has been used for thousands of years to increase the hardness and strength of steel. It is essential to the properties of steel products. The interaction between carbon content, forming operations and heat treatment makes for a vast portfolio of material properties that build the uniqueness of steel.

(surface-hardening, through-hardening), a third system is based on the resulting product (martensite-hardening, austempering). Furthermore, some terms appear to lack any basis in reality: Casehardening (which case?), patenting (which patent?), normalizing (what is normal?), tempering (tempering what?).

All these aspects are what we set out to explain in our Fundamentals of Heat Treatment of Steel. In general, it is possible to differentiate between heat treatments intended to make the steel “softer’’ (reducing its hardness and eliminating stresses) and those that make steel “harder” (increasing the surface hardness or over the whole cross-section). The basis for describing what happens during most forms of heat treatment is found in the changes which occur in an iron alloy when its temperature or carbon content are changed. But regardless of this, it is vital never to forget the basic rule: All forms of heat treatment are expensive, logistically difficult to handle and require stringent inspection. You can optimize your operations by learning more about the processes.

Welding Steel

Welding is the most common way of joining steels together. It is a metallurgical process in which steel is melted, mixed, solidified and heat treated. All in one! Welding normally becomes more challenging as the steel’s strength and/or carbon and other alloy contents increase. That is, except for our Hybrid Steel, which in some cases can be a game-changer. Instead of producing complicated solid elements, or applying expensive mechanical constructions, Hybrid Steel can be welded and then easily post-weld heat treated to full strength and ductility.

Regardless of the material, in order to achieve high quality welds, it is important to know and control the different effects that welding causes. These need to be considered before, during and after the welding procedure itself.

It is important to control this as it has a major effect on mechanical qualities.

Ovako’s Fundamentals of Welding Steel covers mainly the welding of flat and round bars, with the focus on weldability and metallurgical features of different steels. It also includes some practical examples of different welded products. The guidelines are aimed to produce the most high quality and suitable weld as possible. But recommendations alone do not guarantee good results. Ultimately the planner, welder and supervisor are responsible for the final quality.