ABSTRACT
Steel is one of the most preferred and commonly used materials in civil and construction engineering. This chapter discusses the compositions and types of steel products, as well as their standard shapes, grades, and associated reinforcing bars and fasteners. It presents the standard laboratory characterization methods commonly used, as well as the ‘weldability’ calculations. Many items manufactured from iron in the past are now being manufactured of steel. Structural steel is widely used in the United States for the construction of different types of building structures, from low-rise buildings to high-rise buildings, bridges, reinforcing bars, floors, arches, railways, trains, cables, machines, vehicles, and so on. The basic oxygen furnace process is the current primary method of producing steel from raw iron ores. Iron ores extracted from the naturally occurring ores consist of a common feature of being rich in iron oxides, often in the form of magnetite or hematite.
