Magic of Stainless Steel (SS)

photo: Anish Kapoor Cloud Gate, stainless steel

Mr. Nirmal Chand Mathur is the President of ISSDA- Indian Stainless Steel Development Association and Chairman of the Indian Furnace Association of India. He holds a B.Tech degree from BITS, Pilani. He visited NID- National Institute of Design, Paldi, Ahmedabad, India to have a Baatein session (informal talk session) with the Industrial Design student community.

The session began with Mr. Mathur introducing a 5 module online certificate course on stainless steel (SS) to acquire technical knowledge. You can click here to view the course.

Stainless steel has excellent corrosion resistance and doesn't require coating. It looks aesthetically appealing with other materials, has excellent fatigue resistance, high rigidity, low thermal conductivity, is tough at cryogenic temperatures, has good energy absorbing characteristics and is 100% recyclable. The different alloying elements of SS- Iron (Fe), Chromium (Cr), Nickel (Ni) and Molybdenum (Mo) can be combined in different proportions to create a range of varying strength and a variety of applications.

SS has been used extensively in the Rail and Transport sector of India. Street furniture like bus stands are made using SS. The Empire State Building; the sunscreen of the Stockholm Congress ctr 2005; King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (under construction); Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai, China; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; Apple Cube, Manhattan among many more are made using SS. Polished SS has highly reflective properties therefore sheets of SS cannot be used on the roadside as art installations. The AIIMS park in Delhi has spherical steel balls called the mushrooms/ sprouts which are polished but do not act as an element of distraction. They show the best of both worlds - the heavens and the playground of us mortals.

To conclude, the session was useful for the NID student community because mostly doing hands on work leads us to missing out on the theoretical aspects and properties of materials which was fulfilled to some extent in this Baatein session.We were shown two videos and two presentations in which the aforementioned information was contained.