Commercial Steel Building Manufactoring

A high-quality commercial steel building must naturally be created from high-quality steel. Making steel of supreme quality is challenge for all steel producers. The steel must be strong, but not brittle, it must be capable of withstanding a lot of pressure, but not be too heavy, and so on. Today, you can choose among a wide range of different high-quality steel types when you create commercial steel buildings. You might for instance want to use steel with extraordinary high tensile strength for the weight bearing parts, but opt for low-weight steel for large outer panels. 

Inorder to make high-quality steel for commercial steel buildings we must thoroughly understand steel at a molecular level. Steel is an alloy chiefly made up by iron atoms and carbon atoms.

The iron atoms will form natural sheet structures that are very strong and durable. Different layers of iron sheets will however slide pass each other, thus making the steel weaker. This is where the carbon content comes in: the carbon atoms will lock the iron sheets and prevent them from sliding over each other. Steel containing carbon is therefore much stronger than pure iron, and can be used in commercial steel buildings as well as in other types of constructions.

The good thing about understanding how carbon affects the iron sheets in steel is that it makes it possible for us to alter the iron-carbon ratio up and down in order to give the steel different characteristics. As mentioned earlier in this article, you might for instance want one type of steel for weight carrying parts in your commercial steel building, while another type of steel is ideal for panelling. When we alter the carbon-iron ratio in steel, we will affect a wide range of properties, including weight, hardness, elasticity, brittleness, tensile strength and ductility. Steel with very high carbon content will be remarkably strong, but the large amount of carbon atoms will also make the steel more brittle. When creating strong and durable steel, the perfect carbon content must therefore be found – where the steel is strong without being too brittle for the specific purpose that that particular steel is intended for. Steel with an exceedingly high amount of carbon (1.5 percent or higher) is called cast iron and is not very practical to use in commercial steel buildings since it is very brittle. 

So, how can we tamper with the natural iron-carbon content and create strong and durable steel for commercial steel buildings? As long as natural iron is kept in room temperature, its most stable form contains only small quantities of carbon. This type of iron is known as ferrite iron and is comparatively soft, since the iron sheets can slide pass each other without being blocked by a lot of carbon atoms.

At room temperature, ferrite iron will not be able to dissolve more than a maximal amount of 0.021 wt % of carbon, and trying to force more carbon into ferrite iron without changing the temperature is therefore a fruitless endeavour. What we can do, is to heat up the ferrite iron to a temperature of 910° C. When the ferrite iron has reached this temperature, it can suddenly dissolve up to 2.04 wt % of carbon. By heating the ferrite iron up to this point, we transform it from ferrite iron to austenite iron. If we want to create strong steel suitable for commercial buildings, we must quickly cool down the austenite iron. If the cooling process is to slow, the carbon will be forced out of the steel. If we use water or oil to rapidly cool the austenite iron, the carbon will instead be trapped inside the steel and stay there even at room temperature.