Asklemmy

I'm a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there's been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I've been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!

I'm not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there's lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they're boron grades but I can't recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it's processed. It's allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.

Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there's aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.

Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.

It's oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don't need to do things like plan around liquid batching.