7th steeluniversity Challenge

The 7th annual steeluniversity Challenge is about the get underway at 12:00 GMT Tue 13 Nov 2012. This year, entrants are challenged to remelt scrap metal in the electric arc furnace to produce structural steel suitable for earth moving equipment.

Recrystallisation module published on steeluniversity.org

Over the past few months, MeLT has been developing a new interactive e-Learning module for steeluniversity.org entitled Recrystallization.

The module introduces the collective phenomena of recovery, recrystallization and grain growth that cause work-hardened metals to soften during annealing and other high temperatures treatments. The module includes interactive simulations of these processes. It also looks how thermomechanical treatments (TMT) have been developed to produce steels of superior strength and toughness.

In addition to these core topics, sections dealing with nucleation & growth, partial dislocations, stacking fault energy and cross-slip and crystallographic texture are also provided.

SSI Redcar reopens Blast Furnace

Great to hear that iron and steelmaking is making a return to Teesside after a couple of years break.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-17719747

MathJax - Beautiful Math in all Browsers

We have recently started making extensive use of MathJax, an open source display engine for rendering mathematics in web pages that seems to work well in all modern browsers.

It hasn't come a moment too soon, as to date we have usually had to resort to creating bitmap images for all equations, which has been far from satisfactory.

By entering LaTeX expressions in the HTML source code, we now get nicely rendered mathematical expressions. Here are a few examples for the metallurgists amongst you:
$$\sigma_\text{y}=\sigma_0 + k_\text{y} d^{-1/2}$$ $$D=D_0 \exp(–Q_\text{d}/RT)$$ $$X = 1 - \exp\Big[-0.693\Big({t \over t_{0.5}}\Big)^k\Big]$$