Today's steel market is extremely competitive and in order to survive a company needs to produce high quality steel at the lowest possible price. This can only be achieved by mastering all processes of steelmaking, including alloying, which has a big impact on the total production cost. Both European and American steel production standards are rather vague in terms of chemical analysis and the prescribed analytical ranges for alloying elements are quite wide. The range of planned threshold contents of alloying elements can be narrowed and centred around the planned mean value, which should gravitate toward the lower limit defined in the analytical prescription. That way we can produce steel with a lower alloy content while staying within the prescribed analytical ranges for individual alloying elements. As a result, the alloying process becomes less expensive and, consequently, also the end products. We have used standard statistical methods to perform the analysis of existing alloying processes, narrowing and centring, and to determine the lowest possible planned mean values for given alloying elements and types of steel.
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