State-of-the-Art of Inclusion/Precipitate Engineering in Steels
A special issue of Metals (ISSN 2075-4701). This special issue belongs to the section "Extractive Metallurgy".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 December 2025 | Viewed by 552
Special Issue Editor
Interests: particle behaviours in metals; sustainable metallurgy; artificial intelligence (AI)-based material design
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Non-metallic inclusion and precipitate behaviors in liquid- and solid-state steels and alloys have a significant influence on both the cleanliness and the mechanical and corrosion properties of the materials. Two classical terminologies regarding the control of non-metallic inclusion behaviors exist: “Clean Steel Technology” refers to the investigation of inclusion motion, agglomeration, and its removal from the liquid steel and slag. When the inclusion size is too small (normally sub-micron size) to remove, “Oxide Metallurgy” provides a suitable solution to utilize these types of specific inclusions/precipitates to refine the prior austenite grain size (PAGS) and induce intragranular acicular ferrite (IAF) formation to improve the steel mechanical property, e.g., low-temperature toughness. Recently, with the development of simulation and characterization methodologies, the boundary of these two concepts starts to overlap, and it is better to use one concept, i.e., “Inclusion/Precipitate Engineering”, to describe the correlation of processing, structure, and property regarding the particle behaviors in advanced steels and other metallic materials, e.g., high-entropy alloys (HEAs). Besides the behaviors of inclusions in the steelmaking and casting process, the control of inclusions in state-of-the-art processes, e.g., additive manufacturing (AM), is also included in this concept. Finally, machine learning (ML)-based methods, as well as automatic analysis, start to be applied in this field extensively to classify different inclusion types and analyze the statistical features rapidly.
This Special Issue (SI) aims to collate state-of-the-art work focusing on the ’inclusion/precipitate engineering in steels’; both advanced experimental characterization and multiscale simulation research are welcome. This collection aims to contribute to moving ultra-clean steel production towards a more sustainable future.
Dr. Wangzhong Mu
Guest Editor
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