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NIST and the Steel in your Life |
Since the beginning of the century, the steel industry has relied upon NIST's Standard Reference Materials for checking and maintaining the accuracy of its own measurements of the physical and chemical properties of steel alloys. |
Look around your house and you
will find steel--in your sink, your wristwatch, appliance housings, structural beams,
screws, tools, silverware, pots, pans, car, gun, and even an artificial hip. Chances are
that the National Institute of Standards and Technology
has a hidden role in almost all of that steel. From the early years of the century, when
the railroad industry needed to improve the steel in its rails and wheels, NIST (then the
National Bureau of Standards) has been woven intimately into the evolutionary process by
which steel has become one of the most reliable, most used, and most important materials
of the age. Basic steel is an alloy of iron with a spicing of carbon. Steel alloys that
are especially strong, corrosion resistant or otherwise tailored to have specific
properties have more complicated compositions involving such elements as chromium,
tungsten, nickel and cobalt. Careful control over the chemical composition and the way
these components react, mingle and segregate during the formation of the steel alloy is
the path to reliable and marketable steels. Each year, NIST ships thousands of Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) to steel manufacturers, who use them for calibrating their instruments and validating in-house measurements of their products' chemical composition and physical properties such as hardness and electrical resistance. Most of the 125 steel-related SRMs come in the form of chips, disks, powders or rods of steel alloys whose chemical and physical properties have been measured with the exceptional accuracy and confidence that NIST's staff is known for. As one veteran of the steel industry has put it: "I have worked in the industry for 30 years and I could not imagine the last 30 years without the SRMs." |
| Links: | Learn a little more about how the steel industry
and NIST's SRM's have grown together.
Read about the Metallurgy Program in NIST's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory. Get a glimpse of the many kinds of Standard Reference Materials that NIST offers. |