Neue kostengünstige rostfreie Stähle für den Einsatz bei korrosionsgefährdeten Stahlbetontragwerken / New and inexpensive stainless steels for use in reinforced concrete structures in agressive environment

Stainless steel is essentially applied in structural elements in which chemical and mechanical loads are combined and which hardly allow periodic checks. Fixations are typical examples. In case of failure dramatic consequences have to be expected. This is also valid for steel reinforcement in concrete. It is exposed to combined chemical and mechanical load, it can hardly be controled and damage leads at least to enormous costs of repair. Due to the fact that up to now the expenditures for construction are rarely considered together with the expenditures for maintenance, the use of stainless steel is still exceptional. If it is possible, however, to produce cheap steel with a corrosion resistance comparable to steel 1.4401 or even better, wide spread use of stainless steel as concrete reinforcement should be possible. New types of austenitic and duplex steel as being developed in the Laboratory for metal research of Swiss Federal Institute of Technolog (ΕΤΗ) in Zurich without Ni seem to be promising materials. In this case it is tried to replace expensive components by cheap ones such as nitrogen.