New laboratory tests have been developed to characterise the coke behaviour at high temperature under conditions similar to those encountered in the blast furnace, especially in terms of gasification degree. The validity of these new tests has been demonstrated by comparison with the modifications undergone by coke in the blast furnace. The latter have been determined by comparing cokes sampled by a tuyere probe with cokes sampled before charging. The results showed only little correlation with the classical coke characterisation indices (I10, I40, CSR), which indicates that they really bring new information on coke properties.

Existing rolling mills entering the markets for high quality steel may be limited by their descaling systems installed in terms of pressure and flow rate. In addition to the potential for optimizations of existing systems, the potential for optimization of the nozzle design itself has now been fully utilized in order to maximize the impact at a given water flow and pressure. New design methods and production technologies have been applied.

A rolling force model of continuous cold rolling mill based on elastic and plastic mechanics was developed and successfully applied in the control system of a 1420 mm cold rolling mill in Baosteel. Considering simplicity and practicability of calculation, stress of elastic zone and plastic zone during the cold rolling process was calculated and analyzed by incorporated simple finite element method and recursive calculating method. Compared with the measured rolling force, the results of the rolling force model are beyond 96.5%. A method for optimizing rolling force by improving reduction, dimension, coefficient of friction, deformation and tension is put forward.

The links between defect occurrence and process parameters have been identified on the basis of the recorded defect position and severity level. The results of detailed analysis reveal the competition between oxidation and reduction phenomena and the effect of strip surface after pickling on strip oxidation. Industrial trials have validated the effect of the effective process parameters on the coating quality.

The original viscoplastic framework at low homologous temperature is based on the coupling of the E. Rauch's original approach for mixing athermal and viscous term in the flow stress of ferritic steels, a general viscoplastic potential and a microstructure based quasi-static behavior law. The formalism gives accurate results in excellent agreement with available experimental results with only two adjusted parameters, over a wide range of strain rates and temperatures.

A new grade of the 200 series has been defined for the European market as a candidate alternative to austenitic grade EN 1.4301 (AISI 304). The grade was recently assigned a material number by VDEh (1.4618 - X9CrMnNiCu 17-8-5-2). The paper presents mechanical properties of the grade including drawability and corrosion resistance characteristics. The newly designed grade has mechanical properties slightly superior to those of EN 1.4301 (AISI 304) and equivalent to those of EN 1.4310 (AISI 301) grade. In terms of corrosion resistance, the grade is close to that of grade EN 1.4301 (AISI 304), upgrading the classical 200 series.