Over the recent two decades, there has been a trend in metallurgy to alloy steels with nitrogen. This trend is owing to the low cost and many useful properties of nitrogen as an alloying element: a strong austenite-former, nitrogen exhibits an optimal strength-to-plasticity ratio, which allows expensive alloying components to be avoided. Nitrogen steels have found application in various engineering fields. Production of nitrogen steels is restrained by complex and costly metallurgical equipment currently used to provide high nitrogen pressure. A cost-efficient method is proposed to make nitrogen steels, which is based on metallothermy in a nitrogen atmosphere.

The method of making steel alloyed with nitrogen in gaseous nitrogen atmosphere at a pressure of more than 1 atm is characterized by the charge comprising thermite mixture of oxides of metals selected from the V-VIII groups of the periodic table and aluminum in the ratio required for making steel of a given composition and for spontaneous combustion of charge without external sources of heat, with local ignition of mixture provided. The method is cost-efficient owing to the reduced price of the starting materials and cheaper production technology.

Fields of Application: The method can be used for nitrogen steels in metallurgical and machine-building productions, including small-scale production.