1. Reheating before metal forming

1.1 General

• The French steel industry produced around 18 million tonnes of steel in 1993, of which 13 million tonnes were flat products. By definition, a flat product is thin (generally less than 50 mm) compared to other dimensions.

  Today, almost 70% of the world's steel is produced using the continuous casting technique, resulting in semi-finished products, either in the form of slabs for flat products, or blooms or billets for long products. The semi-finished product chain is shown in figure 2 .

  On leaving the continuous caster, the semi-finished products reach a temperature of between 600 and 800°C; their thickness...