Suppose you are appointed as a material engineer at an industry company. The com
ID: 2997404 • Letter: S
Question
Suppose you are appointed as a material engineer at an industry company. The company produces, cutting tools, various car and truck spare parts using different steels. The steels as raw materials to make the parts. All steels are round bars with 50 mm in diameter and 5 m long. However, when the materials were delivered to the company, for some reasons the five different types of steels were mixed up (All the labels are disappeared). Your manager asked you to sort out the mixed steels within a week. There are no chemical composition analysis facilities available. The only information you have is from the delivery documents, where it shows that the materials are pure iron, 1040 steel, 1070 steel, O1 tool steel and 4340 steel. You are asked to provide at least two techniques/methods to successfully complete your task assigned by your manager, and to explain why your techniques/methods will work. clue: microstructure analysis, hardness test, tensile test. But you have to decribe in detail how it is done.
Explanation / Answer
1. Different kind of steels have different densities. Since the volume for each and every rod round bar is same that is All steels are round bars with 50 mm in diameter and 5 m long . So , the bars made with different type of steels will have different mass. All the bars made with same type of steel will have same mass. So , they can be differentiated on the basis of their mass. Away from the laboratory only significant differences in density would give any clues in sorting metals. Heavier (more dense) metals like lead or tungsten or lighter metals like aluminium or magnesium may be easy to recognise from their relative weights. Metals with densities closer to those of iron, eg nickel, chromium and zinc are very unlikely to be distinguishable from their relative weights.
2. Magnetic Response = Observe response when a permanent magnet is made to contact with the steel. Austenitic stainless steels can be sorted from other types of stainless steels. All other types of steels such as the precipitation hardening, martensitic, duplex and Ferritic stainless steels are sensitive to magnet fields. The austenitic manganese steels are the only non-magnetic group of steels.