WR-Steel®, which stands for wear-resistant steel, includes a broad range of grades with many different hardness levels, dimensions and steel grades designed to give you a wear-resistant advantage when making products exposed to a high degree of wear and where service life is important.

The whole idea is to combine cost efficiency at the manufacturing stage, with the right wear resistance in the customers end product. The WR-Steel mission is to optimize the wear resistance of end products and, at the manufacturing stage, give the customer the flexibility to form, shape and weld the steel to fit defined engineering needs precisely. With three main metallurgies of billets, blooms and ingots, the WR-Steel product range is the broadest of its kind in Europe and includes more than 30 different types of boron steel and special grades for mining applications.

Over 680 special profiles supplied close to net shape are available alongside many different sizes of hot-rolled round and flat bars and grinding media. All products cover a wide range of hardness levels, in order to be flexibly tailored to customers’ needs.

Customized heat treatment

No two heat-treating facilities or forging shops have the same needs. One might be overseeing a highly automated operation where furnace temperatures and quenching times are all pre-set by a computer. Another might be a more traditional shop, acknowledged for the skill and experience of the staff while providing a superior steel end product. Either way, the customer depends on a consistent level of quality to get the same high-quality hardening result – batch after batch. Ovako’s range of WR-Steel is characterized by the steel’s consistent quality, tight process controls and good repeatability.

Advantages of WR-Steel®

  • Proven superior wear resistance
  • Broad range of hardness intervals (350–650 HV)
  • Right properties after rolling or heat treating
  • Cost-effective due to optimized alloy content for different end applications
  • Wide range of steel grades in different dimensions
Ovako R&D

Ovako as a technical partner

With a centuries-old steelmaking heritage and decades spent innovating boron steels, Ovako works closely with customers in the development and supply of specialized steel alloys. We offer advice on applying the diverse WR-Steel program that is available for demanding applications and we fully understand how alloying and heat treatment steps can boost productivity and how to achieve just the right hardening properties.

Service life

By choosing the correct WR-Steel, the service life is prolonged, which means fewer parts replacements, greater work efficiency and, ultimately, cost-reductions. Rather than just promising that our WR-Steel grades can save money by extending service life, we turned to the independent RISE KIMAB test facility to simulate extreme industrial conditions and see how we measure up against other hardening and pre-hardened steels.

WR-steel service life

 

We made it! But we are still not satisfied

What a journey! It took years of hard work to make our steelmaking operations more sustainable. In 2022, we went carbon neutral in all operations. But we´re still not satisfied - our journey continue for products with no CO2 emissions.

Read more about our path to carbon neutrality