Ferrium® S53®

Ferrium S53 is a corrosion resistant, ultra-high strength, premium-quality steel for structural aerospace and other applications where 300M and 4340 are typically used, but offers much greater resistance to general corrosion and to stress corrosion cracking (SCC), excellent resistance to corrosion fatigue, and high hardenability. Its resistance to general corrosion is similar to that of 440C stainless steel. Typical applications can include aircraft landing gear, flap tracks, actuators, driveshafts, fasteners, and other highly-loaded components that can benefit from increased resistance to corrosion, corrosion fatigue and SCC. S53 design allowables are included in MMPDS-05, and S53 is covered by SAE AMS 5922.

Want greater toughness and can accept lower corrosion resistance?  See Ferrium M54.

Benefits

Benefits of using S53 vs. 300M, 4340 and other incumbent materials can include:

• Eliminate or reduce the need for toxic cadmium plating, in order to reduce EHS impact and expenses for both initial installation and on-going re-application.
• Reduce general corrosion and related expenses for part condemnation and equipment/system failure.

• Reduce the occurrence of difficult-to-predict SCC failures, and related expenses for part condemnation and equipment failure/downtime.

• Improve resistance to corrosion fatigue.
• Reduce specific manufacturing costs, because the high hardenability of S53 permits less severe quench conditions for a given part section size and typically results in less part distortion during heat treatment.

Licensed Suppliers / S53 Price and Availability

As shown at left please directly contact both of our commercial production/sales licensees, Carpenter Technology Corp. and Latrobe Specialty Metals Company, for S53 material pricing, availability and information.

Technical Assistance

If you have a specific application engineering or technical question that is not answered by our licensee's resources and the additional information below, then feel free to Contact Us.

Design and Development Background

We computationally designed S53 in direct response to and with the financial support of the U.S. Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (http://www.serdp.org), in order to help reduce the use of toxic cadmium in the DoD and elsewhere. QuesTek won a "Pollution Prevention Project of the Year" Award from SERDP/ESTCP for designing S53. The article in Advanced Materials and Processes magazine which is attached below provides significant additional background information.

We're currently serving the U.S. Army under a multi-year Cooperative Agreement in order to qualify landing gear and other components produced from S53.

In 2009 we completed a NAVAIR-funded SBIR Phase I base program to develop a process to harden the surface of components made of S53, to aid the potential application of S53 as a corrosion-resistant main rotor shaft material for U.S. Navy helicopters.