A Review on the Different Types of Steel

Just to review the different types of steel, there are four main families, which makes this retrospect sound suspiciously simple. In point of fact, there’s a certain amount of crossover between at least two of the groups. For example, carbon steels and alloy steels constitute two of the four groups, but carbon steels typically add exotic property improving alloys to their form. As we could’ve guessed, then, nothing’s ever simple, not even this review.

Reviewing the Big Ferrous Four

Iron is rarely employed as a standalone product anymore. It’s too corrosion prone and not capable of satisfying today’s challenging applications. By combining carbon and iron, we get carbon steel. The higher the amount of carbon, the harder the steel becomes. Next, alloy steels add property altering features. Chromium is a common metal additive, as is nickel, molybdenum, and manganese. There are many possible combinations of alloy steels. Because of their numerous forms, entire grades and families have been created to standardize their forms.

A Steel Accented Recap: The Last Two Steel Types

Just as the different standardized grades divide into contrasting steels, each of which has a specially manipulated, alloy-reinforced backbone, so have we decided to mirror that approach. The first two steel groups reside below their own sub-heading, and now the final two types are receiving all due attention. First of all, there are stainless steels. They combine the best properties of the two aforementioned alloy types. They add a percentage of chromium to their metallic base, plus carbon and several of the elements we talked about under the alloy steel category. Corrosion resistant, super-hardenable, yet eminently workable, stainless steels are found everywhere and in everything. That leaves tool steel, another super-hardened form, upon which many types of tools depend. Alloyed with tungsten, vanadium, or molybdenum, tool steel is abrasion-tough, fracture and fatigue resistant, and thermally unyielding.

Of course, this review would be doing the industry a disservice if we were to wrap up the article with that last sentence. For each of those 4 branches further subdivides into numerous sub-branches which divide again, over and over.

For stainless steel, heat treatment technology chemically and thermally alters the alloy’s grain. The microcrystalline structure alters, carbon diffuses, and face-centred cubic structures take form. Again, there are standardized SAE grades here, including the ever-popular 300 series. Austenitic, ferritic, martensitic, and duplex, the different forms of stainless steel rely heavily on heat treatment procedures. Incidentally, regarding mild steel, the stuff that doesn’t incorporate much carbon, these metals are harder to heat treat. They can be surface hardened by adding a carburizing phase to the furnace work.

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