SPECIAL ALLOY STEELSMany steel alloys with compositions tailored to specific requirements
are reported periodically. Usually, the compositions and/or treatments
are patented, and they are most likely to have registered trademarks and
trade names. They are too numerous to be dealt with here in any great
detail, but a few of the useful properties exhibited by some of those
special alloys are mentioned.
Iron-silicon alloys with minimum amounts of both carbon and other
alloying elements have been used by the electrical equipment industry
for a long time; often these alloys are known as electrical sheet steel.
Iron-nickel alloys with high proportions of nickel, and often with other
alloying elements, elicit properties such as nonmagnetic behavior, high
permeability, low hysteresis loss, low coefficient of expansion, etc.;
iron-cobalt alloys combined with other alloying elements can result in
materials with low resistivity and high hysteresis loss. The reader interested
in the use of materials with some of these or other desired properties
is directed to the extensive literature and data available.
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