A Guide to Different Steel Types

You probably use steel for a lot of different things in your daily life, from your car and the roads you drive on to your home or office, and even home appliances. The truth is that there are so many different types of steel and steel supplies, you may not even realize how much you encounter day to day. This is a quick guide to some of the most common types of steel that you can find at a Utah steel supplier like Wasatch Steel. At the steel supermarket, you can find a wide variety of different steel types that will satisfy any building need that you might have, whether it’s for construction on a new home or office building, or simply looking for something you can use in your next piece of art.

The Foundation of Steel
Iron is at the core of steel, and it is a metal that has been in use for centuries. As one of the most abundant elements in the world, making up about five percent of Earth’s crust, it has been extracted from iron ore through the process of smelting and was a integral part of building human civilization. Up until the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 1800s, the process to extract and form iron was relatively inefficient. However, with the invention of the blast furnace by British metallurgist Sir Henry Bessemer, the “Bessemer process” made the production of steel much faster and has fueled the growth of this type of metal as part of our modern world today.

Compounding Steel
Today’s there are several types of steel and steel supplies that you can find at a place like Wasatch Steel, and they contain different metals that are added to change the properties slightly. For example, carbon is added to make the steel stronger, and nickel is added to make it less magnetic and less brittle when exposed to low temperatures.

Classifying Steel
Steel is classified into groups based on its compound metal structure, ranging from 200 to 600.

• 200 Series are austenitic, comprising chromium, nickel, and manganese.
• 300 Series are also austenitic, and are the most common type of steel produced in the world. They have carbon, chromium, nickel and/or manganese, and offer benefits like weldability, wear resistance, corrosion resistance, and temperature resistance, which is useful for sterile surfaces in food production and healthcare settings.
• 400 Series are ferritic, which means they have a high level of corrosion resistance. The trade-off is that they tend to be a little bit less durable than the 300 series, containing higher chromium content and less nickel. Many 400 series steels also contain molybdenum, and sometimes aluminum or titanium as well. 
• 500 Series are heat-resistant chromium alloys. 
• 600 Series are martensitic steels, hardened through heat treatment, and extremely strong. They contain chromium and molybdenum, as well as a little bit of carbon for added hardness. There is a trend among defense contractors to use this extremely high strength steel building things such as aircraft to prevent corrosion. 

Steel is not only one of the strongest and most affordable metals available today, it is also one of the most versatile, and one that can be tailored to meet almost any need that you have by adding the right mix of other metals. Find out how steel can benefit your next project by visiting Wasatch Steel and shopping the steel supermarket today.