The new steel family developed by Ovako Steel in Sweden, a subsidiary in the SKF Group, has been designated Ovatec, which is a registered trademark, and the steels are patent-protected. The reason behind the development effort is that billions of engineering components used in heavily loaded applications are produced in Europe each year. Common to all these products is the need to withstand awesome combinations of high stress, enhanced temperatures and dirty environments, and they also need to do this for very long times without failing. It is essential that they can be produced at a low total cost. Bearing components and gears are typical examples of such products. Repeatable and highly robust quality and performance are required in order to assure customer satisfaction. The steels used to produce such components today were first developed more than 100 years ago. Though they have proven their value over the century, today's requirements for environmental friendliness, productivity, total manufacturing cost and performance make it necessary to re-think steel design, taking into account the long experience of steel-making technology.
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