Newest High Performance Heavy Plates for Steel Bridges and Structures

Being highly cost efficient while maintaining the necessary quality and safety can be considered as the main challenge in modern steel construction. Quality steel producers invest consequently in research and development to further improve the high performance steels. Thermomechanical (TM) steel plates, which have gained more and more ground in the steel construction sector due to their superior processing properties, are now available up to 150 mm thickness. The steel construction fabricators can nowadays benefit from their excellent weldability, especially for the strength class S460, even at highest thicknesses. Other newest developments are the combination of thermomechanical rolling with weathering properties to overcome the existing problem of worse weldability for higher strength weathering steel or the so-called longitudinally profiled plates, which allow a varying plate thickness along the length, and the extremely diverse range of profile types now available.