Wootz is a steel characterized by a pattern of bands or sheets of micro carbides within a tempered martensite or pearlite matrix. Developed in India around 300 BCE^[1]. The word wootz may have been a mistranscription of wook, an anglicised version of ukku, the word for steel in many south Indian languages. The steel cable of a colliery winding tower. ... Calcium carbide. ... Martensite, named after the German metallurgist Adolf Martens, is a class of hard minerals occurring as lathe- or plate-shaped crystals. ... Pearlite occurs at the eutectoid of the iron-carbon phase diagram (near the lower left). ... Franks penetrate into northern Belgium (approximate date). ...

While other methods may be used today, it is theorized that wootz was classicly made in crucibles, e.g., crucible steel by combining a mixture of wrought iron or iron ore and charcoal with glass, which is then sealed and heated in a furnace. The result is a mixture of impurities mixed with glass as slags, and "buttons" of steel. The buttons (with a typical carbon content of 1.5%) were separated from the slag and forged into ingots. The ingots could be further forged out into blades/tools or welded to other ingots to increase the mass of the steel for larger items. Crucible steel describes a number of different techniques for making steel alloy by slowly heating and cooling iron and carbon (typically in the form of charcoal) in a crucible. ... A wrought iron railing in Troy, New York. ... This heap of iron ore pellets will be used in steel production. ... Charcoal is the blackish residue consisting of impure carbon obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances. ... Glass can be made transparent and flat, or into other shapes and colors as shown in this sphere from the Verrerie of Brehat in Brittany. ... A furnace is a device for heating air or any other fluid. ... General Name, Symbol, Number carbon, C, 6 Chemical series nonmetals Group, Period, Block 14, 2, p Appearance black (graphite) colorless (diamond) Atomic mass 12. ... Slag is also an early play by David Hare. ... [[Image:[[Gold bars|Gold ingots. ...

Wootz steel was widely exported throughout the region, and became particularly famous in the Middle East, where it became known as Damascus steel.^{[citation needed]} The critical characteristic of wootz steel is the abundant ultrahard metallic carbides in the steel matrix precipitating out in bands, making wootz steel display a characteristic banding on its surface. Wootz swords were renowned for their sharpness and toughness. A map showing countries commonly considered to be part of the Middle East The Middle East is a region comprising the lands around the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea, a territory that extends from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Wootz steel. ... In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed. ...

The techniques for its making died out around 1700 CE after the principal sources of special ores needed for its production were depleted. Those sources contained trace amounts of tungsten and/or vanadium which other sources did not. Oral tradition in India maintains that a small piece of either white or black hematite (or old wootz) had to be included in each melt, and that a minimum of these elements must be present in the steel for the proper segregation of the micro carbides to take place. General Name, Symbol, Number tungsten, W, 74 Chemical series transition metals Group, Period, Block 6, 6, d Appearance grayish white, lustrous Atomic mass 183. ... General Name, Symbol, Number vanadium, V, 23 Chemical series transition metals Group, Period, Block 5, 4, d Appearance silver-grey metal Atomic mass 50. ... Hematite (AE) or haematite (BE) is the mineral form of Iron(III) oxide, (Fe2O3), one of several iron oxides. ...

Wootz was possibly rediscovered in the mid 19th century by the Russian metallurgist Pavel Petrovich Anosov (see Bulat steel), who refused to reveal the secret of its manufacture other than to write five one-sentence descriptions of different ways in which it could be made. Bulat is a type of steel alloy developed by Pavel Petrovich Anosov in 1838, when he completed ten years of study into the nature of Damascus steel swords and eventually managed to duplicate the qualities of that metal. ...

Master bladesmith Alfred Pendray re-discovered what may be the classic techniques in the early 1980s, as later verified by Dr. John Verhoeven. ^[2][3]

Another method of wootz production, using modern technology, was developed around 1980 by Dr. Oleg Sherby and Dr. Jeff Wadsworth at Stanford University and Livermore National Laboratories. Even though this steel had the charactertistic bands of microcarbides, whether or not this could be considered wootz was disputed by Verhoeven since it was not made in a classical manner.

Recently, researcher Peter Paufler from Dresden University in Germany has discovered evidence of carbon nanotubes in Wootz steel, although this is disputed^[4].

Trivia

• An elaborate fictionalized description of Wootz steel manufacture is presented in Neal Stephenson's historical science fiction The Confusion, part of Stephenson's three-volume work The Baroque Cycle.
• The manufacturing of Wootz steel is also detailed in Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series.

Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer, known primarily for his science fiction works in the postcyberpunk genre with a penchant for explorations of society, mathematics, currency, and the history of science. ... The Confusion is a novel by Neal Stephenson. ... The Baroque Cycle, a series of books written by Neal Stephenson, appeared in print in 2003 and 2004. ... Leo Frankowski (born in Michigan) is an American writer of science fiction novels; he is now a resident of Russia, where he lives with his wife and adopted teenage daughter. ... Conrad Stargard is the protagonist and title character in a series of time travel novels written by Leo Frankowski. ...

References

1. ^ IISC
2. ^ J.D. Verhoeven, A.H. Pendray, and W.E. Dauksch (1998). "The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades". Journal of Metals 50 (9): 58-64. 
3. ^ Verhoeven, J. D. (1987). "Damascus Steel. I. Indian Wootz Steel". Metallography 20 (2). 
4. ^ Reibold, M; Paufler P, Levin AA, Kochmann W, Pätzke N, Meyer DC (November 16, 2006). "Materials: Carbon nanotubes in an ancient Damascus sabre". Nature 444 (7117): 286. DOI:10.1038/444286a. Retrieved on November 17, 2006. 

A digital object identifier (or DOI) is a standard for persistently identifying a piece of intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with related data, the metadata, in a structured extensible way. ... The PlayStation 3 is released in North America Category: ...

External links

• The key role of impurities in ancient damascus steel blades
• Wootz steel: an advanced material of the ancient world
• Indian heritage in metallurgy
• Nanotubes present in Damascus Blades