Stainless Steal

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General information:

    The prularity of unique proprieties of the stainless steels cause, that this kind of steel is a very strong candidate among various sorts of materials. Engineers, specialists and designers often undervalue or do not perceive these superlatives. The first, what they notice is comparatively high price of purchase. However, in consideration of the persistence of products made from this material, stainless steel as the raw material is often best and  the cheapest solution.

What does stainless steel mean ?

    The stainless steel it's fundamentally a steel with with the lowered content of  carbon, in which chrome is at least 10% of weight. Exactly this content of chrome is a factor assuring the stainless character of steel. Reaction of the chrome contained in steel with oxygen makes for creation of a very thin (approx. 1/1000 mm), permanent, not visible and stainless layer of the chromium oxide on the surface. This layer is passive i.e. does not react with other substances. In the event of physical or chemical damage this layer automatically regenerates, under condition if there's constant access to a small quantity of oxygen. That′s why the knives performed from stainless steel can be sharpened and polished many times and will never get rusty. Unique proprieties of stainlesss steel can be improved by adding of a greater quantity of chrome and an addition of other components such as molybdenum, nickel. In the fact there's 60 different alloys of stainless steel , but the main partition embraces five groups of steel:

Discovery

    The inventor of stainless steel, Harry Bearleey, was born in 1871 in Sheffield, England. His father was a metallurgist. For the lack of competency, aged 12 he's been forced to abandon school and undertake work in a chemistry laboratory  where he washed bottles and containers. Within the next years, he learnt individually and undertook education at an evening-school. This way Harry Bearleey's became an expert, resolving problems connected with metallurgy. Being a well-known expert in the range of metallurgy, in 1908 Bearley's founded Brown Firth Laboratories, which were financed by two smelting works, leading at that time.

    In 1912 Bearleey began works over firmer steel, non-eroding under influence of temperature as quickly as conventional steel. One of the experiments which he realized was adding of an admixture of chrome having the higher melting-point to the alloy of steel. He's made many tests, adding from 6% to 15% of chrome conjointly with various content of carbon. So, exactly on 13 August 1913 the first true stainless steel's been made . It contained 0,24% of carbon and 12,8% of chrome at that time . However, the creator was'nt exactly aware of his own success. Not till the next experiments, when Bearley investigated the molecular structure of steel, exposing it to the activity of strongly corrosive acids, it appeared that new steel did not change the structure under the influence of these compounds. Within one year from Bearleey's discovery, Krupp company in Germany passed experiments on the alloys of metals adding nickel. This way they have created a steel more easy in the tooling, more resistant on the activity of acids. Exactly these two explorations gave rise to stainless steel. But only after the I World War experiments of adding various combinations of chrome and nickel to the alloys were started.

    The most of today′s kinds of steel have been discovered between 1913 and 1935 in England, Germany, France and America. After the II World War the production of stainless steel became more and more effective,  every now and again new varieties began to come into being, more resistant on the activity of acids and with better ratioes of the endurance to the mass. The values of stainless steel become sighted more and more often,  it increases the range of uses.

Benefits of stainless steel