Machine building steel

Machine building plates are widely used in all machine building sectors:

• To manufacture heavy underground and land machinery (casings, housings, high-stressed components for mining, road and handling machines, wear plates, crane jibs, etc)

• To manufacture agricultural machinery components (ploughs, blades, harrows, and parts of seeding machines)

• To manufacture parts for freight and passenger vehicles (load-bearing elements of bodies and housings)

• Machine tool engineering and heavy engineering (bodies and housings of woodworking and metalworking machines, as well as parts and components of equipment for metallurgical, chemical and other operations)

High-strength rolled products with a tensile strength of up to 1,800 MPa are commonly used to reduce the weight of machine components and bodies (after thermomechanical rolling or quenching and tempering). As loads on operating components of mining equipment increase, they require the use of rolled plates with a thickness of up to 200 mm and a guaranteed level of mechanical properties. High-strength (with a tensile strength of up to 2,000 MPa) and high hardness (up to НВ 650) rolled products are used to process high-abrasive rock.

The machine building industry consumes a wide range of steel grades, from ordinary carbon to high-strength alloyed and stainless. The standards followed most frequently to produce machine-building steel are:

• European norm EN 10149 and its Ukrainian equivalent DSTU EN 10149 (three parts) for steel with high yield strength for cold forming, which appear after thermomechanical rolling, normalised rolled or normalised.

• European norm EN 10083 and its Ukrainian equivalent DSTU EN 10083 (three parts) for rolled products for quenching and tempering from nonalloyed and alloyed steel.

• European norm EN 10025-6 and its Ukrainian equivalent DSTU EN 10025- 6 for fine-grained steel, delivered as fine-quenched and tempered.

• European norm EN 10084 and its Ukrainian equivalent DSTU EN 10084 for non-alloyed and alloyed steels for face-hardening.

• US standard SAE J 403 for general application carbon steels

• Ukrainian and CIS standards DSTU 8541 / GOST 19281, GOST 19282, DSTU 8429 / GOST 14959, TU U 27.1-26416904-201-2010, TU 5.961- 11650-97 and TU U 27.1-26416904-150-2005.

Due to the extensive use of automatic steel structures for sawing, cutting, drilling and welding lines, users require machine building plates to be supplied with a high flatness guarantee class (S as per EN 10029).

Machine building steel plate production

Machine building steel plate is hot rolled at reversing mills equipped with one, two or three working mill stands. Steel slabs produced either by continuous casting or by hot rolling ingots in blooming mills (slabbing) are the feedstock for such production. During production, rolled products for machine building pass through the stages of heating in a furnace and rolling slabs into plates with specified temperature-deformation modes, finishing and heat treatment (if necessary). Products can be delivered in a hot-rolled state, as well as after various types of heat treatment during or after rolling (annealing, quenching and tempering, normalisation, normalised rolling, thermomechanical rolling, controlled rolling, etc).

When supplying steel for machine building, the manufacturer may provide additional processing services that are performed at the manufacturer’s premises, in steel service centres or by contractors:

• Flattening in levelling machines and presses to improve plate flatness (reduce waviness and buckling of the rolled products).
• Shot blasting: cleaning the metal surface from scale or rust and removing minor surface defects by directing a flow of abrasive material (steel grit). This type of processing forms a surface layer with high compression stresses, thus reducing the risk of fatigue damages, corrosive failure and corrosion mechanical cracking. Shot blasting prepares the surface for the application of protective anti-rust priming.
• Applying protective coating or painting the plate: priming the surface of rolled products temporarily protects metallic surfaces from corrosion during manufacturing of structures, and their post-production erection in the facility until application of the basic anti-corrosive protection. Shot blasting and priming are often carried out on the same process line.
• Metal plasma cutting, bending, bevelling: manufacturing semi-finished steel products to decrease consumer costs for further processing of rolled products and reduce the production cycle while manufacturing final steel structures or items.

Buy machine building rolled plates from the manufacturer

Metinvest offers machine building plates within a wide range of sizes and grades (thickness up to 200 mm, width up to 3400 mm and length up to 25 m) for all segments of the machine building industry. Rolled products for machine building are available as hot-rolled and heat treated in accordance with the requirements of key international standards (EN 10149-2, EN 10083, EN 10084 and GOST 14959) and the customer’s technical specifications. Machine building plates can be purchased through the Group’s global sales network of 38 sales offices in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, as well as 16 metal service centres in Ukraine and authorised dealers.