The steel industry is facing major challenges, making quality a key success factor. SPC Werkstofflabor GmbH is a service partner to the industry and relies on a combination of light and scanning electron microscopy from ZEISS. 

“The requirements for components made of steel are becoming increasingly stringent,” says Alexander Meier, managing director of the accredited materials laboratory SPC. “At the same time, supply is falling and prices are rising for crude steel.” Processing quality and efficiency are thus becoming all the more important. As a service partner for materials testing and failure analysis, SPC supports the industry in this regard – and has relied on microscopy solutions from ZEISS in its work for many years. Alexander Maier explains: “Optimally matched hardware and software solutions, cloud services for sharing results and powerful automation functions mean that we reliably deliver reproducible results and do so as efficiently as possible – which is exactly what is needed in the current situation.”

Lower quality of crude steel and scrap

Thomas Schaupp is laboratory manager at SPC. He, too, knows the pain of the steel industry all too well: “A very high percentage of crude steel came from Russia until two years ago, and it was very high quality”. He says the replacement steel from other sources is now of poorer quality, and the same is true of scrap, which is always added proportionately to steel products.

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