Preface

In the current highly competitive field of materials, steels continue to be widely used, and of these the plain carbon and low alloy steels usually are the material of choice for structural and machine components. The purpose of this book is to provide background information on the practical physical metallurgy of the heat treatment and choice of these steels. The material presented here should be of value to engineers involved in the application of steels in manufacturing who must be aware of all aspects which provide a competitive benefit. This will be of particular interest to metallurgists and metallurgical engineers, but also to other engineers involved in the design and use of components made from steel.

Considerable information from the literature has been used to illustrate the points made, but no serious attempt has been made to convert the data to SI units. Conversion tables are given in appendices.