Can You Change the Properties of Steel with Your Own Hands?

Become a materials engineer for a few hours! Design a heat treatment process for steel, carry out your own experiments and discover how its properties and internal structure change.

We invite secondary school students to take part in a hands-on project day. The approximately three-hour programme will give you the opportunity to experience what it is like to work as a materials engineer.

This time, you will not just watch experiments – you will carry them out yourselves!

What will you do?

You will work with structural steel and explore how its properties can be modified through quenching and tempering.

• Get to know the material – learn about a specific type of steel, its structure and properties.
• Design the heat treatment process – using technical materials and the relevant standard, you will design your own quenching and tempering procedure.
• Carry out your own experiment – perform heat treatment on steel and discover what happens during the process.
• Measure the material properties – carry out hardness and impact energy measurements, which provide information about the material's toughness, and compare the results before and after quenching.
• Explore the microscopic world – use light and electron microscopy to observe changes in the internal structure of the steel.
• Evaluate your results – record your measurements and observations in a laboratory report, identify the observed microstructures and draw your own conclusions.

From Experiment to Understanding

Why does steel become harder after quenching? How does its toughness change? How is the heat treatment process related to the internal structure of the material?

You will not find the answers to these questions in textbooks alone. You will measure, examine and verify everything yourselves. You will discover that every change in a material's properties is driven by specific physical and metallurgical processes.

Practical Information

• Duration: approximately 3 hours
• Group size: maximum of 10 students per group
• Location: Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Brno University of Technology

Would you like to experience what it is like to work as a materials engineer? Book your project day and discover with us what heat treatment can do to steel!

For more information, please contact Simona Hutařová.