NIST Industrial Impact

Business: The steel industry
Number of Employees: 180,000

Steel. It is the strength and stability of skyscrapers and bridges spanning miles. It is the stuff of machine tools and mass manufacturing. It is the material of this century's two gargantuan war efforts. It is big, big business. In 1991, the U.S. steel industry sold $27.3 billion worth of material and, even after dramatically paring back its workforce, employed over 180,000 at 83 companies that shipped 78.8 million tons of steel.

From the early years of the century, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (known as the National Bureau of Standards until 1988) 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 made from iron whose normal carbon content of 4 percent or so by weight is reduced to usually less than 1 percent and whose properties are extremely sensitive to precise differences in composition. Special alloys depend on specific additions of other elements such as chromium for stainless steel, or chromium, tungsten, and vanadium for particularly hard tool steels. The central challenge of the industry is to produce the desired amount of steel with the specified properties with the greatest possible efficiency.

To some industry representatives, the most consistent and crucial kind of assistance that NIST has lent comes in the form of Standard Reference Materials, or SRMs as they are known in the trade. NIST ships over 125 steel-related SRMs that manufacturers use for calibrating instruments and validating in-house measurements of their products' chemical composition and physical properties such as hardness and lectrical resistivity. Most of the steel-related SRMs are chips, disks, powders, or rods of steel alloys whose chemical composition has been measured with exceptional precision and accuracy.

In 1993 alone, NIST shipped 5,963 SRMs related to the chemical composition of steel alloys. These SRMs are as central to a steel company's operations as a tape measure is to a carpenter. "We use these things [SRMs] every day," says Thomas Dulski, a senior analytical chemist at Carpenter Technologies Corp., a century-old specialty steel company in Reading, Pa., which supplied steel cables to the Wright Brothers and now specializes in high-end steel alloys for such things as surgical implants and parts for air bag systems. "I have worked in the industry for 30 years and I could not imagine the last 30 years without [SRMs and] interaction with NIST. It would be a different and lesser industry if it had not been for NIST."

Makers of huge volumes of basic steel rely just as heavily on NIST's SRMs, notes Dulski, who also is chairman of the steel analysis committee of ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials), a voluntary standards organization through which industries develop consensus on technical issues such as manufacturing and testing practices. "Without those SRMs, their operations would be virtually impossible," Dulski notes.

The NIST connection with the steel industry reaches nearly as far back as NIST's creation by Congress in 1901 when the steel industry was still maturing from its industrial roots a few decades earlier.

At the time, railroad accidents were occurring at a rate of over 4,000 each year, causing an annual average of almost 13,000 deaths and injuries between 1902 and 1912. The blame, it seemed, rested with broken rails, wheels, flanges, and axles pushed to failure by a combination of excessive loads, inadequate maintenance, and inferior iron and steel. Besides subjecting specimens from railroad disasters to chemical, mechanical, and microscopic investigations to uncover the bases for good and bad metal, NIST began supplying the steel industry with some of the first "standard materials," which companies used to better control the properties of their products. That was the start of an extended relationship between NIST and the steel industry, which Dulski says only becomes more critical and diverse today. Besides using SRMs, the steel industry now regularly interacts with NIST via cooperative research arrangements, consortia, workshops, trouble-shooting sessions, and other collaborative mechanisms whose common goal is to improve existing technologies and to develop new ones. It would seem that this NIST-industry connection is as strong as steel.

March 1994