Very Short and Very Long Heat-Treatments in the Processing of Steel

There are significant processes emerging where the heat treatment times can be as long as 10 days or shorter than 100 ms. In both of these examples, extraordinary properties are achieved which have made the treatments commercially viable. Heat treatment involves the thermally activated movement of atoms into lower energy configurations. Therefore, the time-scale of the heat treatment depends on the choreography of the atomic motions, whether the motions are coordinated or not. It is demonstrated that remarkable structures can be generated by controlling these mechanisms, including structures that have never before been observed or generated on a scale that is large enough to exploit.