Sustainable Manufacturing of Ferritic Stainless Steel

Abstract

The current study investigates a sustainable way of manufacturing the ferritic stainless steel. The ferritic stainless steels mainly suffer from the ridging and drawability during manufacturing. To obtain the high deep drawability and ridging resistance, the ferritic stainless steel undergoes a number of processes including close control of alloying, continuous casting, hot rolling, annealing, cold rolling and final annealing process. The process control to get better ridging resistance and drawability is very critical in the casting, hot rolling, cold rolling and annealing part. In this study, four different process routes were explored to identify the best route suited for ferritic stainless steel of 409L variety. The ultimate aim was to identify if any process can be removed so that energy can be saved and sustainability can be achieved. The study suggests that the ferritic stainless steel can be processed without heavy cold rolling in Z mill after hot rolling. The EMS can eliminate the columnar grain and can eliminate the need of offline heavy cold rolling. © 2026 Scrivener Publishing LLC.