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Steel Plates

Steel plates are flat sheets of steel that are used in an extensive variety of applications across industry, commerce and in consumer products contexts. Steel plates vary in terms of their widths, thicknesses, chemical compositions and in other ways, but they are consistently valued for their strength and durability.

Steel plates are very commonly used in construction and engineering in the construction of buildings, heavy equipment, municipal utilities and other structures that must be built with very strong materials. After service centers prepare steel plates, they are purchased and used in the building, automotive, electronics, shipbuilding and aerospace industries, among many others. Steel plates can be used in the construction of ship hulls, truck beds, bridges, freight liners, oil rigs, workbenches, shelving, freight elevators and many other kinds of buildings, vehicles and equipment. Because of their qualities of strength, durability and impact resistance, steel plates are used widely by defense contractors, law enforcement bodies and militaries for the protection of vehicles and buildings against explosions and ballistics. Steel plate armor remains and indispensable tool for protecting people from harm in many contexts.

Steel plates can be formed in a few ways. Hot rolling is among the most common steel plate shaping methods. Hot rolling processes are performed above the recrystallization temperature of the steel material. Recrystallization temperature is the temperature at which the structure of the material changes to the point where it loses its rigidity and becomes ductile. In other words, when enough heat is applied to steel, it can overcome its hardness and can be shaped easily. The steel, once it reaches this temperature, is passed through a series of rollers, which squeeze the steel into a flat shape. This process gives the steel its shape, and it also determines, to a significant extent, the steel plate’s qualities of strength and durability. Steel plates can also be cold rolled, which is very similar to hot rolling except for the fact that the steel in cold rolling processes is not heated. This reduces the risk of oxidation and imparts compressive stress onto the material, which strengthens it. Hot rolling, though, produces few deformational stresses in the material than does cold rolling. Other plate forming services include plate sawing, heat treating, stress relieving, annealing, normalizing, flame cutting, special testing, milling, deburring, straightening and shot or sand blasting. Steel plates are often pickled in steel service centers, which is a treatment used to clean or remove impurities on steel by applying sulfuric or hydrochloric acid to the surface.