Glossary

Hard Drawing Spring Steel Wire

A medium high-carbon cold-drawn spring steel wire. Used principally for cold-wound springs.

Hardenability

The response of an alloy to a specified heating and quenching cycle – usually understood to be the maximum hardness that can be attained with the individual heat using the specified heat treatment, as used in connection with the martensitic (hardenable) stainless steels.

Hardening

Any process for increasing the hardness of a metal or alloy.

Hardness

Measurement of a material’s resistance to deformation. The types of hardness tests employed at Ulbrich measure the material’s resistance to penetration. The hardness tests conducted at Ulbrich are

Heat

The quantity of steel produced by a furnace with one melting. Steel melting is a batch process and each batch is a heat.

Heat Number

An identifying number assigned to the product of one melting in an electric arc furnace

Heat Treatment

Controlling the constitution and properties of metals and alloys by heating and cooling.

Herringbone

A defective surface condition characterized by chevrons at roughly 45° angles to the rolling direction. Condition can be induced during cold-rolling.

High Strength Steel

Commonly known as High Strength Alloy(HSLA)-A specific class of low-alloy steels in which increased mechanical properties and, usually, good resistance to atmospheric corrosion are obtained with moderate amounts of one or more alloying elements other than carbon.

Homogenizing Annealing

An annealing treatment carried out at a high temperature, approaching the solidus temperature, for a sufficiently long time that inhomogeneous distributions of alloying elements are reduced by diffusional processes

Hot Dip

In steel mill practice, a process whereby ferrous alloy base metals are dipped into molten metal, usually zinc, tin, or terne, for the purpose of fixing a rust-resistant coating.

Hot Roll Band

This is what a coil is called as it is removed from the hot mill downcoiler until it has received its first cold-rolling operation.