This article presents the work carried out to define quality criteria of a new scrapsource for the steel industry: steel wires generated by grinding end-of-life tires. Thedefinition of this promising new secondary raw material source is perfectly in agreementwith the European Directives 75/442/CEE and 2000/53/EC, dealing with waste and recyclingof end-of-life vehicles, thus answering the environmental needs of our society.

Grindingtires generates an interesting secondary raw material (rubber granulates) but also twowastes, steel wires and textile fibers. We estimate that steel wires represent in Europe180 kt of steel every year which is not, or badly, valorized. This study showed that therecycling of these steel wires in steel mills was possible and viable, one necessarycondition being the determination of the non-metallic content remaining on the wires andkeeping it lower than 4%.

Les pièces de forge sont universellement reconnues pour leurs bonnes propriétésmécaniques, notamment en fatigue. L’approche proposée ici consiste à intégrer lasimulation du forgeage dans le dimensionnement en fatigue des pièces forgées. Le fibrageet le taux de corroyage sont deux caractéristiques principales du forgeage. À l’aide dulogiciel FORGE®, le fibrage est calculé tout au long desopérations de mise en forme. Ce fibrage, ainsi que les contraintes résiduelles, sontensuite introduits dans des outils de dimensionnement pour améliorer la prédiction ducalcul de durée de vie en fatigue. Les critères de fatigue actuels, basés sur des modèlesisotropes, ne permettent pas de valoriser le sens long de ce fibrage, et par là les piècesde forge, car c’est en général dans ce sens que ces pièces sont le plus sollicitées. Uneextension anisotrope du modèle de Papadopoulos est proposée sur la base d’une campagneexpérimentale effectuée sur des éprouvettes prélevées à 0°, 45° et90° par rapport à la direction de fibrage. Une modélisation à l’échelle micro(DIGIMICRO) permet également de mieux comprendre le rôle des inclusions sur lessollicitations en fatigue. La mise en place d’une chaîne de simulation virtuelle globale àl’échelle d’un composant industriel, associée à des modélisations microstructurales,permet de mieux comprendre et de quantifier le rôle du fibrage sur les propriétés enfatigue à grand nombre de cycles des pièces forgées.

The Arab world has been less affected by the financial crisis of 2008–2009 than manyother regions of the world. As an illustration, the apparent steel consumption has beengrowing to a level of 40 to 45 Mt/year, like in China or India but not so fast. The steelproduction is also growing, but is still in the range of 15 to 17 Mt/year: the region is alarge steel importer, around 30 Mt/year. It is interesting to note that this trade is,essentially, between the two sides of the Mediterranean Sea. Regarding the production, itmust be remembered that this area has the special feature of being based on the directreduction of the iron ores through the natural gas-based processes such as Midrex or Energiron (ex – HYL). Steelmaking is carried out inEAF (electric arc furnaces) and it must be noted that, in the Marrakesh congress, theTurkish delegation mentioned that a new company in this country is designing andmanufacturing electric arc furnaces for mini-mills based on scrap. A last point has to bestressed: the diversification of the steel products made in the Arab world. After a timewhere the emphasis was on light long products (reinforcing bars and light profiles), theproduction is now moving to heavy products such as beams and tubes, and flat products.

Because of the importance of lightweight constructions, nowadays other materials are moreand more substituting components which had previously been made of metals. The usage ofshort fiber-reinforced plastics instead of metals seems self-evident in many cases becauseof their high specific strength and the favorable manufacturing processes. For fatiguelife prediction a simulation process was established, which takes into account the fiberorientation and distribution as a result of an injection molding simulation. Hypothesesfor fatigue life prediction of orthotropic materials have been derived from a lot of testson specimens, implemented in the standard fatigue software tool FEMFAT and verified so farwith component tests.

Production processes of integrated steel plants, mostly based on coal as an energy source, produce about 2 tons of CO2 per ton of steel. As specific CO2 production has to be decreased by 20% in the mid-term (2020), immediate action is required to further decrease the specific energy consumption. The integrated plant is not energy self-sufficient as extra electricity must be bought from outside, but on the other hand, produces an excess of process gas that has to be used within the plant. Optimisation of the use of the internally produced gases is a key issue as either they are burned at the power plant with a conversion yield to electricity of about 40% and often much lower, or might be valued in the plant internal heat exchangers with a much higher efficiency such as  ~90% in the hot stoves or  ~65% or more in the present reheating furnaces. This paper shows that using the high-value coke oven gas as a chemical reactant (for DRI production) leads to significant extra metal production. From a global viewpoint, this extra metal production is almost carbon-free, as it requires only electricity for its manufacture.

The phases obtained in copper aluminium bronze alloy (Cu-10wt.%Al-2wt.%Fe) cast into apermanent mould were investigated. The parameters examined were the thickness of thegraphite coating of the mould and its pre-heated temperature. The phases α andγ2 were detected as well as the metastable phases β′ and γ′. The intermetallics of the Fe-Al system were obtained in variousstoichiometric compositions. The different cooling rates of the casting led to twomechanisms of transformation into α-phase grains out of the unstable β-phase, one beingnucleation and growth producing needle-shaped grains, the other exhibiting a massivetransformation into spherical grains.