Everything about Wootz Steel totally explained
Wootz is a
steel characterized by a pattern of bands or sheets of micro
carbides within a tempered
martensite or
pearlite matrix. It was developed in
India around
300 BC. The word
wootz may have been a mistranscription of
wook, an anglicised version of
ukku, the word for steel in
telugu and many south Indian languages.
Wootz steel was widely exported throughout the region, and became particularly famous in the
Middle East, where it become known as
Damascus steel after being locally forged into swords. Critical characteristic of wootz steel is the abundant ultrahard metallic carbides in the steel matrix precipitating out in bands, making wootz steel display a characteristic banding on its surface. Wootz swords, especially damascus blades, were renowned for their sharpness and
toughness.
Manufacture
While other methods may be used today, it's known that wootz was classically made in crucibles, for example,
crucible steel by combining a mixture of
wrought iron or
iron ore and
charcoal with
glass, which is then sealed and heated in a
furnace. The result is a mixture of impurities mixed with glass as slags, and "buttons" of steel. The buttons (with a typical
carbon content of 1.5%) were separated from the
slag and forged into
ingots. The ingots could be further forged out into blades/tools or welded to other ingots to increase the mass of the steel for larger items.
The techniques for its making died out around 1700 after the principal sources of special ores needed for its production were depleted. Those sources contained trace amounts of
tungsten and/or
vanadium which other sources did not. Oral tradition in India maintains that a small piece of either white or black
hematite (or old wootz) had to be included in each melt, and that a minimum of these elements must be present in the steel for the proper segregation of the micro carbides to take place.
Wootz was possibly rediscovered in the mid 19th century by the Russian metallurgist
Pavel Petrovich Anosov (see
Bulat steel), who refused to reveal the secret of its manufacture other than to write five one-sentence descriptions of different ways in which it could be made.
Master bladesmith
Alfred Pendray re-discovered what may be the classic techniques in the early 1980s, as later verified by
Dr. John Verhoeven
.
Another method of wootz production, using modern technology, was developed around 1980 by
Dr. Oleg Sherby and
Dr. Jeff Wadsworth at Stanford University and Livermore National Laboratories. Even though this steel had the charactertistic bands of microcarbides, whether or not this could be considered wootz was disputed by Verhoeven since it wasn't made in a classical manner.
Recently, researcher Peter Paufler from Dresden University in Germany has discovered evidence of carbon nanotubes in Wootz steel, although this is disputed .
Trivia
Further Information
Get more info on 'Wootz Steel'.
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