Steel - Its Inception And Where It Is Today

Steel  is an alloy that is made of a mixture of mainly iron and 0.2% to 2.1% carbon. The production of iron plays a major role in the process of making steel. Carbon in turn is the alloying material used for alloying iron. Chromium, manganese, tungsten and vanadium are the few other materials used to alloy iron. The varying use of a mixture of these materials results in different types of steel with varied properties such as hardness and ductility which are required for different applications in multiple industries. An alloy that possesses carbon content in iron which is more than 2.1% is called cast iron and not steel. Cast iron has other purposes in the industry because of its lower melting point and enhanced castability.

Steel although first produced somewhere around 1400 BC was not easily available because the procedure which was used to produce steel was rather difficult to follow and control which made it uneconomical. But later in the mid eighteen hundreds with the invention of the Bessemer process, by Henry Bessemer, it finally became economically viable and hence the production and demand of steel increased greatly. The Linz-Donawitz process of basic oxygen steel making again made steel much easier to produce and was more economical resulting in an even wider demand for steel. The increased craving for steel at that time lied in steel’s properties of resisting rust which was much better than other metals. Steel also had better weldibility along with being easier to produce than other metals which had such properties.

Hence steel became a popular with industries that were in those days using wrought metal as the metal of choice for building tools, machinery and other equipment. Steel manufacturing today is much different and has changed leaps and bounds compared to the techniques used in the 1800s.The modern steel electric arc furnaces (EAF) have made steel production dependent more on the availability of cheap electricity, than the mining of iron ore because the furnaces being highly productive use large amounts of electricity. Today there have been vast improvements in the field of mining as well as in the production equipment. Steel industries in the Middle East and all over the world have increased the production of steel to 1,413.5 mmt in 2010, which is widely used from the enormous building and constructions projects, to the ship building industry to the automotive industry and even in day to day electronics and appliances. 

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