Use of cold-rolled grain-oriented steel as described above continued with only steady refinement and improvement in the production process until the late 1960s.
However, in 1965 the Japanese Nippon Steel Corporation announced a step-change in the quality of their electrical steel: high-permeability grainoriented silicon steel.
Production is simplified by the elimination of one of the coldrolling stages because of the introduction of around 0.025% of aluminium to the melt and the resulting use of aluminium nitride as a growth inhibitor.
The final product has a better orientation than cold-rolled grain-oriented steel (in this context, generally termed ‘conventional’ steel), with most grains aligned within 3° of the ideal, but the grain size, average 1 cm diameter, was very large compared to the 0.3 mm average diameter of conventional material.
At flux densities of 1.7 T and higher, its permeability was three times higher than that of the best conventional steel, and the stress sensitivity of loss and magnetostriction were lower because of the improved orientation and the presence of a high tensile stress introduced by the so-called stress coating.
The stress coating imparts a tensile stress to the material which helps to reduce eddy-current loss which would otherwise be high in a large-grain material.
The total loss is further offset by some reduction in hysteresis loss due to the improved coating. However, the low losses of high-permeability steels are mainly due to a reduction of 30 40% in hysteresis brought about by the improved grain orientation.
The Nippon Steel Corporation product became commercially available in 1968, and it was later followed by\ high-permeability materials based MnSe plus Sb (Kawasaki Steel, 1973) and Boron (Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, 1975).
No comments:
Post a Comment