Since the beginning of the century, the steel industry has relied upon NIST's Standard Reference Materials for checking and maintaining the accuracy of its own measurements of the physical and chemical properties of steel alloys. Chances are that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a hidden role in almost all of that steel.
Basic steel is an alloy of iron with a spicing of carbon.
Steel alloys that are especially strong, corrosion resistant or otherwise tailored to have specific properties have more complicated compositions involving such elements as chromium, tungsten, nickel and cobalt. Careful control over the chemical composition and the way these components react, mingle and segregate during the formation of the steel alloy is the path to reliable and marketable steels. Most of the 125 steel-related SRMs come in the form of chips, disks, powders or rods of steel alloys whose chemical and physical properties have been measured with the exceptional accuracy and confidence that NIST's staff is known for. Read about the Metallurgy Program in NIST's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory. Get a glimpse of the many kinds of Standard Reference Materials that NIST offers.