Editorial

Nanoengineering in the modern steel industry There is a growing current awareness of the potential benefits of nanoengineering in the modern steel industry, and may leading research and development institutes and companies are pursuing research in the area of nanostructured steels. In the industry, the term ultra-fine grained is generally used to describe steels with average grain sizes between 1 and 2♣μm in diameter and the term submicron (submicrometre) structure to refer to grain sizes between 100 and 1000♣nm. Until recently, effective processing techniques to reduce the grain size of these materials to less than 100 nm did not exist. There are major difficulties in creating novel nanostructures that have a combination of properties appropriate for large scale applications. An important requirement is to be able to manufacture nanostructured components which are large in all dimensions. In addition, the material concerned must be cheap to produce if it is not to be limited to niche applications. Severe deformation by methods such as mechanical milling, equal channel angular processing and high pressure torsional straining has not succeeded in this respect. Although mechanical milling and alloying can produce powders containing nanosized grains, grain growth cannot effectively be suppressed durin