This paper gives an account of the symposium organized in May 2002 in the memory of Dr Wolf, who died in November 2001. Many experts in the field of continuous casting have participated to this symposium, which has been the occasion to review the progress made in the continuous casting of conventional and thin slabs and to evaluate the state of the art and perspectives of thin strip casting. At the same time, general trends for the future in the steel industry have been discussed.

Together with the company Lafarge Refractories GmbH, a new concept was introduced for wear lining of the steel ladle bottom. The disadvantages of the monolithic wear lining used in the 90s were eliminated by the introduction of the so-called quasi-monolithic bottom. Several dried pieces of tabular-alumina-spinel-material are put into the bottom as a puzzle and spilled with each other. The special feature of these precast pieces is not only the use of material of different grain sizes, but also different grain forms in a specific ratio to each other. The bottom of a test ladle was repaired 18 times by casting a self flowing tabular-alumina-spinel castable, what led to clear cost savings. Since the end of 1999, all big ladles at Stahlwerk Bous are converted to this quasi-monolithic bottom. The resulting advantages are discussed.

“Stand-support sintering”, that is supporting the load of the sinter cake with bars or plates attached to pallets, has been developed and applied practically to the sintering machines in Kimitsu works, Nippon Steel. The stands start to support the load of the sinter cake just after the top layer is melted and starts to solidify. Shrinkage is stopped and the gas flow rate is increased when the stands start to support the load of the sinter cake. It was found that sintering time was shortened and productivity was improved in actual sintering machines.

Surface laser alloying can improve mechanical behaviour, particularly hardness, wear or corrosion resistance. Here, different boron coatings - boron carbides, boron, boron-iron or zirconia-boron mixtures - on a chromium-molybdenum steel are laser melted; the laser tracks show rather homogeneous microstructures; hardness increases with boron content and can reach about 1200 HV over a one millimeter depth with 5.7% boron, without the formation of the brittle phase FeB.

The coupling effects between mechanics and corrosion which are involved during corrosion-fatigue of metallic materials are analyzed through significant examples. Quantitative approaches for crack initiation and crack propagation are given and discussed in terms of micromechanisms. The introduction of localized corrosion- deformation interactions in damage modellings is proposed and further trends for numerical simulations are introduced.

This paper describes a method for producing model composites by the powder metallurgy route in order to control the spatial distribution of the reinforcement in a metallic matrix. The materials are fabricated by successive steps including mixing and extrusion. They are then characterized in 3D by X-ray tomography.

The behaviour of argon gas bubbles in the CC machine is described in the present ECSC project involving Irsid-TKS-CSM. Several approaches are combined and compared, namely water and numerical simulations, which show the same trends as observed on products. Process improvements could be defined in relation with the defects linked to argon gas in the tundish nozzles.

The common experimental methods used in the laboratory for the study of corrosion-fatigue are based on the evolution of global mechanical and electrochemical variables in relation with environment, mechanical loading or microstructure. For a better understanding and modelling of the physical-chemical processes involved in crack initiation and propagation, it is necessary to make use of techniques giving access to quantitative informations at local scale. Recent results concerning the breakdown of passivity, the morphology and the growth kinetics of potential initiation sites, the corrosion processes at crack tip and quantitative fractography are briefly reviewed.

The components for electronics and electrotechnics are usually classified in two families with similar market shares: the “active” components and the “passive” components. The aim of this paper is to analyze and to describe a range of ceramics passive components. The materials properties and the resulting service properties of ceramics parts are presented. This presentation is then illustrated with some significant examples of ceramics components.

In Europe about 600,000 tons of dusts are generated in EAF steelmaking. Valuable metals like zinc, lead, chromium and nickel are recovered from these dusts by external processors, usually. In the past, only few attempts on internal recycling have been made. Within a Brite EuRam II project, the economical and ecological benefits of the internal recycling of EAF dusts from engineering grades steelmaking have been documented. Recent investigations are dealing with the internal recycling of EAF dusts from high-alloy steeImaking, aiming at the recovery of chromium and nickel as well as at an improved foaming of the slag.

EKO Stahl has successfully installed a Parsytec HTS3 surface inspection system in the hot strip mill. The main reason for the installation of this system was the growing demand for the immediate detection of surface defects. Using the system it was possible to significantly reduce the downgrading in the cold rolling mill because of surface defects. The benefits of the system are the improved possibilities to investigate the reasons for surface defects and the early re-routing of non conforming products. As an example, the procedure used to investigate the emergence of edge shells is presented.

This article reviews the major aspects of the historical success of the LD process developed in Austria exactly fifty years ago. At the start there are the fundamental considerations of Henry Bessemer and their successful transposition into an industrial steelmaking process. The evolution led to several modern variants of the process, which account presently for a significant part of the world steel production.

The paper presents the work done to assess the usefulness of the thermographic analysis in the design of a detection system for longitudinal defects in coils manufactured by a tandem cold mill. The approach started with a first phase devoted to the development of a computer system for the acquisition of high resolution thermal maps of the whole strip. In the second phase the thermal maps are classified and related to the process variables.

The History of Industry mirrors the History of Society, by which it is also reflected. Its purpose is to describe the emergence of technologies, which exhibit a personality of their own and not only bring out new possibilities, but also a stiffness to which all stakeholders, should to some extent yield, especially the decision makers in business circles. Technologies that succeed commercially are those which are able to provide sustainable answers to the demands put forward successively by each one of them. These robust technologies, which are not identical to the disruptive technologies of K. Brimacombe, meet criteria, which in effect are true innovation paradigms. A list of these is proposed here, stemming from a retrospective analysis of process development in the Steel Industry. It is probably adventurous to project these into a technological forecasting exercise, due to the non-deterministic nature of history. But this is an interesting way to focus on the challenges that should be met in the future and that no stakeholder would refuse to face.

Efforts made since a few years in view of the integration of mechanical laws in numerical simulation now spread to friction behaviour. After presentation of the major laws available in the literature, a method permitting to obtain an empirical friction law is described. The validity of this approach is illustrated through the analysis of the tribological behaviours of three steel sheets: cold rolled, electro-galvanized and hot dip galvanized.

Modern blast furnaces need to be supplied by modern sinter plants. This article presents a series of design and automation solutions for both installations, which not only contribute to an increase of their performances, but also allow to improve sinter and hot metal quality, as well as to optimize operational costs. This is confirmed by the upgrading project examples shown.

Two specific examples are presented to describe the experience gained in the use of mechanical tests for the study of stress corrosion cracking and corrosion-fatigue: 1) the design of tension test platforms and low-frequency fatigue machines, having cross-head displacement rates of the order of 1 μm/h; 2) the use of curved tension test pieces to take into account heterogeneities of the material microstructure, in the case of cracking phenomena in burried pipelines.

Starting from known linear models for calculating the electric energy required to elaborate a heat in an electric arc furnace, new approaches based on artificial neural networks (ANN), have been studied. The effects of strongly non-linear relations between critical furnace process parameters, and other variables, not taken into account in an equation based model, have been integrated in the ANN models. Both the off-line and on-line use of models based on time series and a new system of interconnected ANNs are described. The on-line model is designed to accurately predict the end of the heat.

Mode II fatigue crack growth tests have been carried out at different frequencies, in air and in vacuum, in the case of a maraging steel. By changing the experimental conditions, the tribological behaviour at the fatigue crack sides is modified and changes in mode II crack growth rate and growth stability are obtained. By measuring the displacement profile along the crack sides, ΔKIIeffective can be estimated and data obtained with varying friction conditions can be rationalized.

Nanocrystalline oxide ceramic powders are usually metastable and tend to transform into a stable phase during sintering. In this paper dealing with the sintering behaviour of nanosized alumina powders, we present the effects of several parameters on the macroscopic and microscopic behaviours during the pressureless sintering.