When planning for a new product where steel is to be the main component, you must first decide on its type and strength.
Usually, once the strength and type of steel has been decided upon for a project, you go to market and contact a range of suppliers to ascertain whether they have the type of steel you need, and to your specifications. It becomes a task in itself, and depending on the speed of the responses, it adds time to the project that will end when you can start manufacturing your product.
This is where a company that provides a range of online tools for you to use to provide this information can save a lot of time. SSAB has such a service, covering a wide range of their steel products and services that you can use for free to understand if they might be able to supply the type of steel you need for your product.
These online tools and downloadable mobile apps give your selected steel’s performance parameters related to your product’s requirements. You input the steel gauge, weight, size and other product dimensions you need and the tools respond with results. These results can tell you whether SSAB has steel that you can use to build your product.
The main benefits of these tools are that you can understand immediately whether an SSAB product will be suitable for your product, and approach their engineers and technicians for final decisions, rather than have protracted conversations back and forth. Once the page/app shows the results based on your input, you can simply export this information to a pdf and share it.
Online tools and apps
The latest addition to their tools is:
ProtectionCalc
This app has been designed for the entire Armox® range of protection steel products, where you input parameters for base properties, such as which grade of Armox® or Ramor® you want, its thickness, width and length, and discover what protection levels your selected steel will offer.
Details will be provided on blast and fragment protection, what its mechanical properties will be, yield and tensile strength, maximum transversal, and longitudinal bending recommendations, how best to cut and weld it, estimated bending force and its springback properties.
Others currently available are:
EcoUpgraded mobile app
This app is ideal when you need information related to the green credentials you can claim for your product. Using SSAB high-strength steels, which have much greater durability and productivity for their weight than standard steel, will add years to your end product’s endurance and life cycle, and reduce its environmental impact.
Simply enter details of the machine and its operational parameters and you will discover the following:
- Fuel savings over equipment lifetime
- CO2 savings over equipment lifetime
- CO2 payback time
Steel Selector app
This tool allows you to enter various parameters and specification for the type of steel you need for your product. You can select whether you want sheets, coils, plates, tubes, sections or bars, and what type of coating you might want. Then you can choose whether you need the following:
- Wear resistance
- Structural
- Hardened (Boron)
- Armoured
- Weathering
- For tooling and engineering
- Laser-cut
- Automotive
- Pole Sheet (with magnetic properties)
- High temperatures (up to 590°C)
- Low temperatures (down to -60°)
You end by stating the thickness you need, and the result will inform you which SSAB product will fit your product’s bill.
BendCalc mobile app
This can help calculate bend parameters for press braking of SSAB steels, including Strenx® Performance Steel, Docol® The Automotive Steel, Hardox® Wear Plate and SSAB Domex®. Results will include the force required for your product’s profile, springback characteristic, bend radius etc.
WearCalc mobile app
How useful would it be to you if you could quickly understand if the steel you make your product from will have the service life, impact wear, sliding wear, erosive wear, and payload strength you need?
SSAB’s Hardox® wear and abrasion resistant steel plates have an app that can inform you if this steel has a suitable weight/grade for the type of material that will be trying to wear it out as fast as possible.
Hardox®-based products, made by an Argentine metal fabricating company, include lifting arm telescopic container spreaders and cutting blades (Caterpillar Inc.), with a Swedish customer producing jaw crushers and liner plates.
There is also a desktop version that works through browsers and can give you information on the sliding, impact and erosive wear related to the type of vehicle and which takes size, shape, impingement angle and velocity of material into account. It generates reports based on input parameters and is available in 11 languages.
WeldCalc mobile app
Want to know the ideal weld profile for your product in seconds? You can discover the best methods for the joints, precise grades and thicknesses for raw steel needed and many other data points, including a risk analysis based on inputs for Hardox® wear plates and Strenx® performance steels.
There is now a third-generation version that makes decades of SSAB experience available in an interactive web-based application to help fabricators optimise and document welding performances.
There are five components to WeldCalc 3.0:
- Calc – create your own welding lab for a specific welding situation
- WPR – stands for Welding Procedure Record, and this optimises the welding performance based on the requirements stated by the user
- pWPS – Preliminary Welding Procedure Specification defines and qualifies the joint configuration and welding performance
- WPQR – Welding Procedure Qualification Recording is where notes are made of exact welding parameters of relevance during the performance of the pWPS. Then, after the joint has passed mechanical and non-destructive tests, the WPQR is approved
- WPS – The Welding Procedure Specification is issued once a WPQR is approved. This document details to the welder what the approved welding conditions are for this product’s welds
FrameCalc software
This tool will shorten the design phases of products for designers and fabricators who make roof trusses using structural hollow sections. Enter geometry, loads and steel grades parameters and you can get optimised information on minimising the product’s mass or manufacturing costs, and the differences between steel grades used for trusses. Plus, the software will help you understand the additional benefits of SSAB’s high-strength steels according to Eurocode 3.
Another example is the software for SSAB steel piles. It gives results according to the Eurocode design standards as well as national annexes and instructions for end-bearing pile design. RRPileCalc and PileWallCalc programs are free of charge but need to be registered for full functionality.
