Unalloyed and low-alloyed steels are iron-carbon alloys with an alloy content of less than 5% by weight. They are used, for example, as structural steel in mechanical engineering.
Using metallographic analysis, we can determine the pearlite and ferrite content, classify the pearlite structures and evaluate impurities such as manganese sulphides. The left image shows examples of line-shaped manganese sulphides. We can also check the heat treatment status of your components or semi-finished products. Annealing, hardening and tempering can be used to set a wide variety of properties in steels. These states can in turn be evaluated metallographically in order to draw conclusions about the respective process and possible heat treatment errors. The right image shows a normalised structure of an S235 (formerly St37).
