A review is given concerning some of the recent industrial developments of stainless steels. In austenitic stainless steels,two different directions of alloy development are noticeable:low nickel austenitic stainless steels and high nitrogen stainless steels.In these two cases the aims are different,particularly in terms of strength,but the philosophy of alloy development and the scientific approaches are very similar and they all revolve about the role of nitrogen as an alloying element and how this affects strength,ductility and corrosion resistance. There is now a broad and useful basis of information as to how nitrogen affects solid solution hardening,grain boundary hardening and work hardening and how to make use of these effects in developing materials required by the world market. In the field of corrosion resistance,ferritic,duplex and austenitic stainless steels compete with each other and now there is a growing body of information concerning the relative corrosion resistance based on laboratory data. However,for practical applications and for alloy selection,more than just laboratory data are needed,and thus,the first results are presented here of a many years comparison of the corrosion resistance of 24 commercial stainless steels exposed to corrosion in outdoors marine atmosphere.Hope is expressed to involve in the near future even more steels from a wider range of manufacturers in such corrosion studies.This might help consumers in appropriate alloy selection.It might also help steel makers in developing appropriate stainless steel grades.
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