Question: Whatdo you have to do to the steel to make it 'stronger'?

Bernard Ennis answered on 9 Nov 2015:

The easiest way is to add carbon to the iron, heat it up and then cool it down very quickly. This results is a very high strength; unfortunately the steel is then not very ductile and that makes it not very practical for making nice shapes out of. What we try to do is to add things to the internal structure of the steel so that certain parts (what we call phases) of it are very strong (like the example given above) and other phases are nice and ductile. Depending on the application we try to tailor the amounts of these different phases to give us the properties that our customers need to make the parts they need and let it function in the way it needs to during its lifetime.