Iron & steel are the backbone of any societies industrialization. Rail transport of goods the most energy efficient way to move large amounts of mass over long distances because of the exceptional low friction of the system when compared with diesel powered trucks with rubber tires mounted to wheels traveling over paved roads, highways & freeways respectively.
Roads offer a more flexible ability to generate good distribution over large areas of land, think urban sprawl of suburban neighborhoods & residential areas near large cities, often extending to the boundary or rural less populated & less developed areas. Railways or railroad routes tend to connect industrial zoned lands in cities to other cities, and cost vastly more per mile than paved roads. Most rail in the USA, especially passenger rail routes were torn up & replaced with roads because of geopolitical corruption between the earlier version of the Ford Motor Car company & then largest automaker of the world GM or General Motors.
America thus became a network of passenger vehicles & trucks & busses on roadways with only a few major industrial railway left behind. Many former railway routes near cites like Seattle have been turned into recreational trails. Once booming coal or metal mining areas long ago shut down & more recently development in parks & residential zones. I am thinking of Coal Creek between Bellevue & Newcastle or what used to be called North Renton, just to the East & South East of Seattle, in Washington State, USA. Coal Creek was a thriving coal mining area just over 80 years ago & boy has King Country the most populous & most densely populated county in the State Washington changed over those decades. Even in Bellevue, blueberry farms & hazelnut orchards have been taken by emanate domain to become light rail routes & the Downtown Bellevue Complex owned & operated largely by one billionaire name Kemper Freeman.
A local real estate developer named Bob Wallace wrote an article in the Seattle Times news paper when I was in High School more than 20 years ago, about how people were forced to drive further away from the city centers in order to find affordable housing out near the permitter of King Country on the Border of Snohomish Country or Pierce Country, enduing long commuters to their jobs in more central locals closer to downtown. This suburban sprawl of single family homes was 5X less expensive just 15 years ago, these homes often selling for under $80,000 in the early 1980's are now selling for nearly $800,000 a 10X increase in cost for housing. Some of that cost increase because currency inflation makes the USD about 1/2 as powerful now in 2023 as it was in 1980, so adjusted for inflation, these homes back then were selling for around $160,000 of todays funny fiat currency money, still a far cry from the inflated prices making homes unaffordable to so many people that Seattle has a housing & homelessness crisis known on the local news channels as "Dying Seattle" or otherwise called gentrification as home & rent prices increased radically faster that wage increases, making the homes proportionally more costly such that mom & dad now both have to work full time to cover the costs of food, fuel & housing or what social demographers refer to as "Life's Basics" / I am talking about milk, eggs, chicken, beef, seafood, flour, sugar, salt / prices increasing by 3x in the last 10 years. Many of the packaged foods at Safeway come in smaller boxes or smaller jars & sell for higher prices. Think a jar of peanut butter that sold for $3 in 2015 that now sells for $7.50 or milk that sold for $0.99 per gallon when I was in high school that now sell for over $6.50 per gallon. Gasoline was $99/ gal when I was first driving back in 1999 & it now sells locally as corn ethanol contaminated E10 with less energy that straight or pure gasoline, for $4.10-$4.90 per gallon, for 87 octane regular unleaded E10 fuel with up to 10% ethanol added.
Blast furnaces burning coke, coal & iron ore into which manganese, magnesium, vanadium, silicon, carbon & other elements are added like chromium to make stainless steel & thousands of other grades of steel available today, with industrial vertically integrated steel companies like TATA in India we fueling the production of thousands of tons of weapons & rails for railways & trains that were the workhorse of the 1st & 2nd industrial revolutions. Think of the battleships, the aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, I am talking about pipes made of copper nickel alloys resistant to sea water corrosion, high grade stainless steel, iron & the strong compact flexible metal that builds bridges directly or as rebar in concrete infrastructure.
Today aluminum comprises the engine blocks & heads of most piston engines in automobiles mass produced by the worlds automakers, while steel sheets, stamped at high speed & welded by teams of robots working a welding syphony of electric arc welding MIG style to bond the steel sheets into vehicle body shells or space frames (unibody) later dipped in various baths to enhance with corrosion inhibiting platings, coatings, sacrificial layers or paints, coatings, sprays, waxes, largely in order to block water & oxygen from forming rust or iron oxides by steeling electrons away from iron surfaces.
Mild steel, iron, pig iron and many tool steels & knife steels rust easily because they were optimized for holding a sharp edge or mechanical strength not corrosion resistance. Nickel steel copper alloys, iron cobalt alloys, vanadium steel & many other novel steel alloys are able to resist creeping at high temperatures, able to act as springs or mechanical energy storage devices, or are corrosion resistant or stainless by forming chrome layers on the surface that are one of the hardest materials known, and chrome plating often used to make steel parts shiny or sparkly, a popular aftermarket tuning option for many Harley motorcycle owners who Crome out their bikes or motorcycles respectively.
Steel alloys are used to make guns, firearms, pistols, revolvers, cannons, military tanks, brackets, barrels, drive shafts, transmission parts, gearing, gears, linkage, suspension components, springs, shocks, bolts, screws, nuts, and other parts that require compact strength at a reasonable price. While exotic materials like titanium alloys are more corrosion resistant, stronger & lower mass, they also cost 6 to 20X more than steel used to make the same part.
Rust Prevention
Spay paint, lacquer, epoxy, coating, resin coating, synthetic plastic, rubber dip, parkerized, blued, oiled, electroplated, electroless plated, waxed, varnished, coated, laminated with non corroding metal for strength & corrosion combo, acid etched, hot salt treatments, forging, annealing, welding, there are many things that influence the corrosion resistance of a steel device, part or product.
Often steel parts of nickel plated to give excellent corrosion resistance at a reasonable price. Steel is the most affordable per unit of mechanical strength of any metal, thus steel & iron are extensively utilized in tooling, infrastructure, vehicles, buildings, bridges, homes, commercial buildings, in wind turbines, to secure solar PV modules, in stop signs as bolts to hold the signs to the post or even the post itself made of steel.
Innovating Steel Furnaces
Argon gas covered electric arc furnaces are at the forefront along with microwave smelting, laser smelting, e-beam smelting & other ways to direct precision electrical heating into molten pools of iron to add other elements to make high strength precise steel alloys with exceptional mechanical strength, flexibility, corrosion resistances, improved wear resistance, improved ductility, improved hardness, improved edge retesting, adjusting the metallic crystal grain broundries & grain size, grain distribution, grain shape, and the electrical or electronic properties of the resulting steel produced.
Steel furnaces underwent many technological innovations throughout history. Traditional craftsmen in India who make steel the artisanal way require more than 250 kilograms or wood, coal, coke or similar carbon combustion materials to produce 1 kilogram of artisanal steel. Industrial high volume steel production was enabled by the blast furnace technology that pressure pumps air or oxygen into the molten hot steel furnace to burn out impurities & where other elements are added to the iron like carbon in precise amounts to make different steel alloys.
There are exotic aerospace grade steel alloys used in the launch stands where chemical space rockets like the SpaceX falcon X are launched. The mostly steel launch structures are concrete intensive while the steel is coated in a fireproofing fiberglass ceramic mix to prevent the steel from catching fire. If you want to see a spectacular steel fire, get some steel wood & pull it apart until its loose, doing this outside over concrete not near a building or anything flammable, apply a flame or hot spark to one of the fine steel wires of the steel wool & you will enjoy warm orange & red colors sparks as oxygen burns the steel in air, even though air around 80% nitrogen by volume & about 1% argon, respectively.
Speaking of Space X rockets, the BFR made of stainless steel. Other local aerospace companies in Kent Washington have chosen to make their aerospace rocket engine spacecraft out of steel because steel offers excellent mechanic performance at a low cost. This is why Space X switched to liquid natural gas with cryogenic oxygen in the primary launch stages, because LNG very cheap as a rocket fuel & actually when combusted directly with liquid oxygen very clean burning with low emissions for a relatively clean launch in terms of mostly non-toxic air pollutants like CO, CO2 & a little bit of black carbon & small amount of oxides of nitrogen.
The passenger car catalytic converter may have noble metals on the ceramic core, but the housing of the converter & its heat shield or almost always made of steel, aluminized steel, titanium in very high cost motorsports where emissions controls still used to clean the exhaust of toxic emissions (rare) while most exhaust headers are made of steel to take exhaust gases away from the engine head into the exhaust pipe where resonators, mufflers, O2 sensors, catalytic converters, air injection & other exhaust emissions reducing technologies are used to reduce toxic components in the tailpipe emissions.
I am talking about combustion that's 25-50x cleaner burning than a typical gasoline fueled 2023 model year passenger car. Passenger car gasoline engines have excitedly dry emissions during cold star when the vehicle engine is first started & has not heated up to its full operating temperature, such that the catalytic converter also cold & has to reach 1000 C in order to convert toxic exhaust gas components into non-toxic emissions, so the tailpipe emissions of a car during the first 90 seconds after starting up are exceedly rich with toxic HC or hydrocarbon vapors, and smells like the exhaust from an antiquated carburetor vehicle. Some people associated the smell of these brain & kidney damaging tailpipe emissions with progress & freedom, and call themselves petro-licious, gear heads, people who enjoy watching Top Gear the TV show hosted by Jeremy Clarkson in the UK.
I am vehicle crazy, practically obsessed with all things mobility, transportation energy, engines motors, AC systems, pumps, thermodynamics, fuels, batteries, alternators, starter motors, wiring, networking, relays, ECU flashing, digital tuning, fuel system mods, propane conversion kits, hybrid electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles like Honda Clarity or Toyota Mirai but $18/gal for H2 makes hydrogen in these $55-70K vehicles a premium efficiency fuel. Sure, only water vapor emitted, but the PEM fuel cell in those hydrogen fuel cell vehicles contains a lot of platinum which makes the fuel cell sensitive to any contaminates in the air or H2 fuel, since the fuel cells pump air though filters to prevent fouling of the electrode membranes.
Toyota & Honda spent a lot on R&D to cost optimize vertical flow hydrogen fuel cells to make electricity from hydrogen onboard battery electric motor final drive Fuel Cell electric vehicles like the Mirai or Clarity respectively. H2 fueling stations are rare & very expensive, only a few in a few locations near LA in California, USA for example. Steel extensively utilized in H2 refueling stations, in most automobiles, in the Hydrogen Fuel Cell stack in Fuel Cell vehicles. Steel gives compact high strength at reasonable costs, cheaper than nearly any other metals of similar strength that are often bulkier for the same strength like aluminum or way more expensive like titanium, or really expensive like titanium cobalt lithium alloys, or high nickel vanadium silicon steel or other exotic steel superalloys with exception high temperature performance of that amazingly strong 980 megapascal steel used by automakers in the strongest automotive parts, like the forged engine cranks, engine valves, bearings, cam-shafts, transmissions gearing, sleeve bearings, turbo-charger housings, water pump housings, radiator fan blades, the alternator housing, the starter motor housing, the laminated sheets inside electric motors, its steel that enables all sorts of amazing products to exist.
Low mass tuning vehicles with aluminum, carbon fiber, biological fabrics, recycled plastic, post consumer products, magnesium, titanium, alloys of aluminum & magnesium, the automakers are very interested in reducing vehicle mass with ideas derived from Lotus Automobile founder Colin Chapman who intelligent pointed out during the heavy muscle car era, that making a vehicle low mass improves its performance all around, while just adding power and weight only increases straight line, drag strip style acceleration. Many of the Muscle Cars selling while Chapman was commercializing hydroformed aluminum space frame sport vehicles were achieving 5-8 MPG when driving with a sporty acceleration style. In sharp contrast the Toyota 1.8 L motor in the mostly aluminum Elise gets over 20 MPG when driven enthusiastically with motorsport performance style.
If we look at the thermal efficiency of engines developed at Koenigsegg Automotive for their hypercars or supersports cars, we can see that the automakers can get 40-50% thermal efficiency at converting the fuels energy into energy to proper the vehicle forward, and certainly at least Toyota did this in their hybrid synergy drive vehicle engines, with each new generation squeeking out even more thermal efficiency & better performance.
I have to give kudos to Hyundai for the mass production of GDI or gasoline direct injection engines in passenger cars, something that aircraft makers had been doing on piston engine airplanes since the 1950's, but most car owners would never accept the costly maintenance schedule of such aero engines in passenger cars. A typical passenger aircraft requires 8+ hours of maintenance for every hour of fully loaded flight. A typical car requires a 2 hour service every 3,000 to 5,000 miles or even less often by comparison.
Some of the longest lasting gasoline vehicle engines have an iron block & iron head with similar coefficient of expansion that can go 20,000 hours of regular use with basic oil changes. Aluminum engines are more common now as automakers always looking to reduce vehicle mass & iron dominate engines tend to way 30-50% more than a similar aluminum intensive engine. Iron blocks are used in many diesel engines in trucks & busses where the iron block diesel engine has direct injection & turbocharging & much hotter higher pressure combustion requiring a much stronger engine.
These diesel engines have more iron & steel & tend to weigh 30% more mass than a similar gasoline engines but also tent to have 4X longer operating life such that while many passenger car gasoline engines are end of life after 5000 hours, many common diesel engines, even VW TDI passenger car diesel turbo engines can last 30,000 hours before an uncommon & very costly once the car already fully depreciated tear-down rebuilt that rarely ever happens to most cars, SUV' and trucks that end up being auctioned off or scrapped for metal recycling after 20 years or around 200,000 miles of odometer, though some cars last 350,000 miles or 500,000 miles or 1 million miles or more, like the Volvo 240 or many very high mileage odometer record holding Toyota Prius or Tacoma trucks, especially the older Tacoma that did not have frame rust taco effects affecting certain model years. The cummins turbo diesel engine BlueBird school busses I drive for work are mostly made of steel, the body, frame, suspension, engine, transmission, the entire bus steel intensive in terms of material composition.
Hyundai, and Ford, developed cost efficient GDI engines that suffer from coking or soot build up on the intake valve seats, notably because in port injection engines gasoline spray rinses the intake valves while entering the cylinder, and by contrast direct injection engines squirt high pressure gasoline directly into the cylinder when the valves are closed, giving much better performance over a broader range of RPMs and other benefits like better fuel economy & lower emissions at lower RPM's and more torque earlier which makes drivability of vehicles with such engines noticeably better.
It is the BC or black carbon soot emissions of GDI engines that cause the valve coking issues, while some newer iterations of GDI engines include a fuel injector in the intake to clean the valve seats with maintience injections controlled by the ECU that largely eliminate valve coking. Automakes are similarly downsizing engines such that many SUV have 2 liter 4 cylinder engines, often turbo-charged & direct injected to maximize performance, especially since those large vehicles need more engine power due to their increased vehicle mass & poorer aerodynamics meaning the engine has to work harder to accelerate & especially at freeway speeds above 50 mph when aerodynamic penalties increased by a 3rd order exponential.
Many modern diesel engines feature direct injection & turbocharging. If we look at the automotive sector as a whole, the 2.0 L engine used in more than 600 different passenger car, SUV, and truck models, while 98% of all transpiration energy fueled by gasoline or diesel worldwide even though the Tesla Model 3, Chevy Bolt & Nissan LEAF electric vehicles energized by lithium ion batteries are trending emerging technologies, obviously not everyone in the world who own or plans to own a car in the new future can even make reasonable use of an EV that requires regular charging way more often than gasoline fueling events in a conventional vehicle.
EV's will not achieve gas station fuel speed charging sessions until Level 4 or L4 DC fastest charging enables 10 min charges at 1MW of power in vehicles with active battery thermal management that can soak up 1000v at 1000 amps or similar very high power inputs. My 19 Nissan LEAF SV air cooled battery peak charging speed on L3 reaches 44kW through the CHAdeMO DC fast charging port right next to the L2 J1772 input port. I use the L1 EVSE to charge off of a regular power outlet on the deck of my apartment very close to where the LEAF is parked, such that using a 50ft extension cord with the EVSE cable enables charing from any of about 5 spaces closest to the deck.
This obviously would not work for many people who living on the second or higher floors of apartments or condos, or multifamily. This means that EV''s will only be adopted by a tiny minority of people until 10 or 20 years or more when then new model year EV's have much much better batteries. I am talking about battery electric cars with 1000 miles of range per charge, with foam air gold wire stuff from science fiction & very early R&D work now that will commercialized and widely available to automakers for EV battery packs then. Sodium Ion or Na-Ion for example will largely displace Li-Ion in EV applications because sodium its 500% cheaper than lithium & 500x more widely available, largely because of how much salt is in sea water & evaporate lake beds all around the world. You can call them Salt Batteries because they will be made from salt, one the most abundant and widely available mineral resource in the world.
Speaking of EV charing systems, copper is a very valuable nonferrous metal with excellent world wide market penetration in applications as heatsinks & wires of all kinds. Copper has excellent thermal & electrical conductivity & even beautiful like gold as the only other metal with a warm color. Copper makes exceptionally thermal efficient heat exchangers used in instant hot water heaters, AC systems, fridges, heat pumps, especially to move electrical current in very popular consume electronics like smartphones the sell by the hundreds of millions annually.
I am talking about mass produced consumer electronics like flatscreen TV, charging cables, electrical wiring, that required to hook up cell phone towers, wind power towers, to wire up solar PV modules, to electrify homes & vehicles as the premier electrical wire, though pure gold wires are way better but 85x more expensive. In the same vane wires made of high pure oxygen free silver are way better than copper wides, but 25x more expensive. These gold & silver wires find applications in chipset bonding of the IC to the interface ball grid array or pinarray ceramic base mount of the CPU or GPU or SOC stack chip. Gold & silver wires are used in space satellites with high-temp resistant silicone wire insulator. Even hobby enthusiasts DIY fading drones & RC toys use silicone insulator wires, often oxygen free braided copper that can move huge amounts of current between the LiPo battery pack cells, motor control & brushless motors :)
Cloud compute networks derive a lot of their throughput performance because of optical networking with fiberoptic. Optical fibers can carry much more data way faster than copper wires, also without produce RF emissions. Any current flowing through any wire produced magnetic fields and RF emission & can be easily snorted or listened in on using several techniques. This makes fiber optics a more secure way to move data. Fiber optics can be pumped with many frequencies of light in multiplexing to pump even more data in more channels even faster with much higher throughput & this is often used in Data Centers to connect server blades, especially fiber optic data connections in super computers, many of which are used for Earth Simulation, weather forecasting, nuclear research, computation fluid dynamics, CAD, CAE & other engineering to design chip sets.
They optimize the GPU architecture for better gaming performance by NVIDA that uses AI design tools that back-feed loop optimize millions of times, rapidly innovating by pumping all their GPU designs as the data training set, such that the engineering tools help their design engineers come up with class leading architectures that are 3 years ahead of anyone else. This means for self driving cars & other emerging chip set big data applications, NVIDIA & Qualcomm will dominate chip sales. By focusing on chip design & farming out the chip fab to TSMC, NVIDA was able to focus on rapidly innovating the GPU architecture. This gives NVIDIA graphics cars unmatched performance. Esports gaming enthusiasts almost exclusively used discrete graphics made of NVIDIA GPU chips.
5G NR micro-cells are being installed by the million because each can only transceiver data to 5G smartphones over several hundred meters. Older 4G LTE can connect to phones up to 2 km away by comparison. 5G leverages all kinds of other technological advances to offer much faster data, more user channels per antenna, MIMO and beam forming, and the 5G micro-cells are operating at much lower power levels so far lower RF levels, which is important for health & safety because many 5G antenna systems are on the edges of buildings where people are living or working all day or all night near the antenna, so the much lower RF & power levels are safer for people while also offer faster than wired broadband speeds in some cases. Most the 5G phones & 5G cell systems are using the low & mid bands below 6 GHz while high band extends frequencies up to 72 GHz, though mostly below 54 GHz in mainstream of common applications. These high frequencies have poor attenuation through water vapor in the air, especially rain & fog or snow, so they will follow the same many more antenna network design wired into the internet where the 5G signals & thus data streams are ultimate uploaded & downloaded, often simultaneously.
We even see steel widely utilized in wireless infrastructure, in the metal razor wire fence around the RF equipment at the base of the cell towers, in the equipment cabinetry, in the tower frame itself, in many of the antenna brackets, bolts, nuts, fasteners, & other mechanical parts where the high strength low cost of steel unmatched by other material choices, thus highly popular in a wide range of applications as steel offers the best mechanical performance per unit of cost of any metal choice.
4IR or the 4th Industrial Revolution, that refers to globalization, arterial intelligence, electo-mobility & decarbonization, vastly more automation, autonomous vehicles with L5 capabilities being developed in pre-commercialization testing & R&D development early stages at the worlds automakers, while ProPilot via Nissan & similar Advanced ADAS or driver assist technologies like lane keep assist & automatic emergency braking have been widely available on many newer model year vehicles since 2014 & many more models since 2017.
Battery electric vehicles mean that the computer power level available much greater than the alternator of an ICE vehicle could provide, as many passenger car alternators max out at 400 amps at 12 volts total power output, many EV motors operate with peak power of 150kw or more, so the EV battery pack can support peak onboard compute of much greater computational power to ingrate signals from camera, radar, lidar & other vehicle imaging & autonomous vehicle sensor V2V & V2G networks & rolling data center like compute capabilities.
Steel shows up in charging station pedestals, the mounts, brackets, housing, & even the springs & cables used to help reduce lifting effort of the heavy charging cables, often attached to the top of the pedestal charing station by a steel arm with a pulley wheel through which a plastic coated steel cable threaded & attached to a central section of the charging cable, while a steel spring assembly inside the charging pedestal produces retraction tension off the plastic coated steel braided wire cable to help the EV user to lift & articulate the dense heavy copper intensive EV charging cables for L2 & especially the even bigger heaver L3 & emerging L4 DC fast charging cables.
Think more lights off manufacturing & much greater energy efficiency in manufacturing, low costs & higher profits & extensive optimization of everything touched with more applied intelligences, technology & applied science, literally turning science fiction into commercialized technologies, the way that many smartphones & smartwatches today do functions & things that people imagined in sci-fi content many decades ago.
Closely related to steel, industrial high volume production of sulfuric acid H2SO4*H20 & various concentrations in water mixes for lead acid battery manufacturing for example. You can measure the level of industrialization of a country by simply accounting for how much sulfuric acid produced or used domestically, or how many 12v SLI flooded or AGM batteries are consumed, as both are strongly related indicators of how much industrial & vehicle activity happening, or to estimate the market penetration, adoption or diffusion level of industrial capacity by a county. These kinds of analytics are used for economic analysis & forecast, to inform public or government policy making, to give investors information to make informed risk taking investments, to enable academic considerations of industrialization for even deeper analysis, research, for NGO's & other agencies to collect insight on industry & jobs & job creation & value added & industrial productivity & many other aspects of attributes of advanced society or developed industrialized country functionality.
The fragility of modern societies can be understood through the vulnerabilities in the local electric grids, where we find steel in the transformers, substations, power distribution networks, & many other parts of the power grid, power plants & other parts of electrical power generator like wind turbine towers, or in hydropower or geothermal or coal power stations, in nuclear reactors, steel finds many applications in most industrial technologies, especially heavy tooling, commercial tools, industrial tools, machines of all kinds, farming equipment, manufacturing equipment, in pumps, fans, motors, fridges, microwaves, processing equipment, conveyor belts, hoppers, mixers, tanks, in brewers & soft drink plants, in food processing plants, there is literally steel in the ships & trucks, at every level of the supply chain from the mine that makes recovers the raw materials to the crushers that smash the ore into small chunks for thermal & chemical refinement into concentrated higher purity gold or copper or iron for example, steel & steel products are extremely common in agriculture & mining, especially in oil refineries, in ocean oil mining rigs, in ships & tanker ships & tugs & boats, at every level of the economy you find steel alloys providing feasible strength even though iron prone to rusting or corroding more than many other strong metals that tend to cost a lot more. Steel & iron offer more applications profitable feasible strength in compact forms that are easier to design & manufacture & tend to hold up well even under abusive conditions in the real world.
You see that steel dominates the majority of the content in this blog posting because its steel that enables many modern marvels & even the basics in life to be produced on a scale to feed & satiate 8+ billion people at the same time.
Steel mills & concrete makers have enormous carbon & pollution emissions, mainly from combustion cheaper coal & coke as fuels to smelt the ore or for thermal energy to melt scrap steel. Automobile bodies are usually scrap recycled, but recycled steel from scrap cannot feed societies demands for steel, so new iron ore mined continually & more steel continually produced, especially as the standards of living are raised world wide as developing economies become more like America, as poor countries become more developed with industrialization broadly applied in many sectors. In this way you will see steel consumption increase in the future as we go towards 2050 & 10 billion human people alive at the same time, as human population & industrialization continues scaling just like technological development, information infrastructure, the internet & World Wide Web, we will continue to see steel dominate development with concrete, copper wires & optical fibers mass produced to move information & goods at the giga-scale to serve billions of people with products and services that are popular & sell well worldwide, like bicycles, cars, trucks, buses, ships, boats, engines, motors, all the parts in all the different appliances & building materials & machines made of steel or iron alloys.
Think about the Steel in your life? Where do you see iron or steel alloys. Do you have a cast iron pan that you cook with in your kitchen? Do you use a microwave oven with a steel box housing, clothes washing machine or dryer largely made or steel? Do you have car or SUV with an engine or electric motor, those are mostly made of steel. I bet there is a lot of copper & steel in your life if you are reading this blog!
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