Development of materials characterization techniques and their future aspects

Steel industry uniformly makes various qualities controlling both the internal textures and the surfaces of the steel productions, which are manufactured several 10 tons at a time, with the nano-scale. Recently, processing technology with nano-level has been approaching with atomic level because of manufacturing higher grade steel plate. So it is important that atomic level characterization increases along with it. On the other hand, shortage of raw materials and its sudden rise of the price make management situation worse. Analytical technology is expected to propose the next generation of steel plate with competitive edge and its operation provision. In this article, we will introduce several examples of our researches and give the future aspects of analytical technologies for steel industry. (author)