Annealing
Annealing is a heat treatment process. With this, steel products are reheated to a suitable temperature to remove stresses, resulting from previous processing and to soften them and/or improve their machinability and cold forming properties.

Apparent Consumption
The sum of net industry shipments within a given country.

Billet
Billet is a semi-finished steel product with a square cross section up to 155mm x 155mm. This product is either rolled or continuously cast and is further processed by rolling to produce finished products like wire rods, merchant bars and other sections. The range of semi-finished products above 155 mm x 155 mm are called blooms.

Blank
Steel sheet of high dimensional precision, in simple or complex form, sometimes multi-thickness, constituting principally automobile body parts.

Blast Furnace
A furnace used in integrated steelmaking in which coke and iron ore react together under a hot air flow to form liquid hot metal, also called pig iron.

Carbon Steel
A type of steel generally having no specified minimum quantity of any alloying element and containing only an incidental amount of any element other than carbon, silicon, manganese, copper, sulphur and phosphorus.

Coated Steel (Galvanized & Colour coated)

Steel sheet coated through a heat process or through electrolysis with a layer of substance to protect the base metal (substrate) against corrosion. The most commonly used material is zinc which can be applied either using the heat process (hot-dip galvanizing) or using electrolysis (electro-galvanizing). An organic coating (paint, plastic) can also be deposited on the layer of zinc. The zinc-coated steel is often referred to as "galvanized steel".

Cold Rolling Mill

Equipment that reduces the thickness or gauge of flat steel products by rolling the metal between alloy steel cylinders at room temperature. Several roll passes are generally necessary to reduce the steel gradually to the desired thickness.

Electric Arc Furnace
A furnace for scrap-based steelmaking. Once the furnace is charged and covered, graphite electrodes are lowered through holes in the roof. The electric arc travelling between the electrodes and the metallic charge creates intense heat which melts the scrap. Alloying elements can be added during the process.

Electric Sheets
These sheets are produced from steel alloyed with silicon (up to 3.5%) and are used in the manufacture of alternators, transformers and motors. Grain oriented electrical sheets have a high silicon content and are used for the manufacture of large transformers. Non-oriented products are used in electric motors and small transformers.

Flat Steel Products
A flat steel product is a plate product or a (hot or cold) rolled strip product. Typically steel is rolled between sets of rollers to produce the final thickness. Plate products vary in dimensions from 10 mm to 200 mm and thin flat rolled products from 1 mm to 10 mm. Plate products are used for ship building, construction, large diameter welded pipes and boiler applications. Thin flat products find end use applications in automotive body panels, domestic 'white goods' products, 'tin cans' and whole host of other products from office furniture to heart pacemakers.

Hot Rolling Mill
Equipment on which solidified steel preheated to a high temperature is continuously rolled between rotating cylinders. Different types of finished products require different types of rolling mill equipment.

Long Steel Products

A long product is a rod, a bar or a section - typical rod products are the reinforcing rods for concrete, engineering products, gears, tools etc. are typical of bar products and sections are the large rolled steel joists (RSJ) that are used in building construction projects. Wire-drawn products and seamless pipes are also part of the long products group.

Mini-mill
A mini-mill is a molten steel producing process that feeds scrap steel into an electric arc furnace to re-process the material into finished steel for new applications.

Real Consumption
For any country or region, apparent consumption for such country or region adjusted for inventory changes or stockists and end users.

Refining Stand
A stage in the process of making crude steel, during which the crude steel is further refined (i.e., most residual impurities are removed) and additions of other metals may be made before it is cast.

Semi-finished Products
Steel products such as billet, blooms and slabs. These products can be made by direct continuous casting of hot steel or by pouring the liquid steel into ingots, which are then hot rolled into semi-finished products.

Sinter Plant
A plant in which iron ore is crushed, homogenized and mixed with limestone and coke breeze and then cooked ("sintered") to form sinter which is the main ferrous component of blast furnace burden.

Slab
A semi-finished steel product obtained by rolling ingots on a rolling mill or processed through a continuous caster and cut into various lengths. The slab has a rectangular cross section and is used as a starting material in the production process of flat products, i.e., hot rolled coils.

Slag
A by-product, containing inert materials of the burden, produced during the melting process of blast furnace and steelmaking operations.

Stainless Steel
Stainless steels are distinguished from carbon steel by their content of chromium and, in certain cases, nickel. Adding chromium to carbon steel makes it more rust and stain-resistant and adding nickel to chromium stainless steel enhances the mechanical properties of the steel. The resistance of stainless steel to many corrosive factors, such as exposure to water, air, acid and alkalis, is provided by a transparent protective chromium oxide film that forms on its exterior. Stainless steels are manufactured in different types of grade, but all types contain at least 10% chromium, along with other elements added to develop specific properties. Depending on the quantity of the various elements present in a stainless steel alloy, it will have a metallurgical structure that is characteristic of one of three basic stainless steel groups - martenistic, ferritic or austenitic.

Steel
Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon containing less than 2% carbon and 1% manganese and small amounts of silicon, phosphorus, sulphur and oxygen. Steel is the most important engineering and construction material in the world. It is used in every aspect of our lives, from automotive manufacture to construction products, from steel toecaps for protective footwear to refrigerators and washing machines and from cargo ships to the finest scalpel for hospital surgery.

Steel Invention

A British inventor called Henry Bessemer is generally credited with the invention of steel in 1856. He founded the Bessemer Steel Company in Sheffield, England, but up to 1859 the company made a loss. By the time the patent ran out in 1870 he had made more than 1 million pounds sterling. Steel is still produced using technology based upon the Bessemer Process of blowing air through molten pig iron to oxidise the material and separate impurities.

Steel Sections
Any steel product which is neither round, nor square, nor flat.

Steel Types

Steel is not a single product. There are currently more than 3,500 different grades of steel with many different properties - physical, chemical, environmental, 75% of which have been developed in the last 20 years. If the Eiffel Tower were to be rebuilt today the engineers would only need one-third of the amount of steel, modern cars have new steels with higher strength reducing the overall shell weight by 25%.

Strip
Flat steel coil products, with widths of less than 600mm for hot rolled products and less than 500mm for cold rolled products. Thin strip continuous casting.

Thin Strip Continuous Casting
Casting technology that takes liquid steel and casts it into solid strip in one step, thereby eliminating the need for a continuous slab caster and hot strip mill.