Plate mills for higher-strength products

Abstract

Product development in the metals industries never stops. New applications demand new properties, and new alloys are conceived to provide them. Steel is often thought of as a commodity metal, but these days it's really a huge family of speciality metals – a young family too. The majority of today's commercial specifications did not exist 10 years ago. These new products naturally need process refinements to assure their delivery. Now comes the catch: steel plant is not replaced very often. Most of the steel produced in the Western world is made using plant that is 20 years old or more. This means, of course, that the design of this plant did not take into account the requirements of our modern product.