Sulfur and the Titanic?

The Titanic sank because of hitting an iceberg. A recent study also showed that the steel used had high concentrations of sulfur. Metalurgists have found that sulfur causes a cancer type deteroration of steel. Seeing this my immediate thought was that if sulfur can cause this to happen in steel of cruise ship, what is happening to the inside of our diesel engines. The fact that oxygen is also introduced to help the process is even worse. Perhaps our engines are engineered to deal with this and I do fill up with low sulfur diesel as believe this does help.

well, as long as you do not run into an iceberg......lol.

Living in Minnesota you never know what to expect.

I remember seeing something about this Titanic thing on TV (Discovery or History channel) about a year ago.

Some scientist was claiming an analysis of steel from the hull of the Titanic showed the metal chemistry was such that, when cold, the metal would be weak.

Can I logically conclude that the metal in our engines is fine 'cause it is loaded when hot? (probably not, but that won't stop me)

Best to y'all
Utah Bill

Using fuel with sulfur is not the same thing as having sulfur included in the metal itself.

The specific conditions of why the Titanic sank, other than hitting an iceberg, I'm not particuarly knowledgeable about. I know there was a design problem where the bulkheads did not go as high as originally designed to save costs while building. I imagine if the steel was brittle from low temperature, the impact with the iceberg would have been similar to hitting a window with a sledge hammer.

The problem of metal breaking at low temperatures is called the ductile to brittle transition temperature. It became quite apparent during the second world war when we were building steel hulled ships, sending them to Europe via the North Sea and they would break in half before arrival. It was discovered that the alloy being used became brittle at low temperatures. This phenomena began being researched in about 1940. these ships were cracking simply from the stress of waves.

Sulphur causes a condition called hot shortness in carbon steels. This is where the steel will crack when being hot worked. This phenomena became very apparent in the 1860's (thereabouts) with the development of the Bessemer steel process. It was pretty well known by the time of the Titanic...

I can't imagine we would have enough sulphur present, even with poor diesel fuel to have much to worry about. The contamination would affect other things long before affecting the base metal. I can't imagine the injectors are made from plain carbon steel, anyone know? It would take quite some time to difuse the sulphur out of the fuel and into the metals it contacts...

dj

Weirdest non-GD-section thread EVER.

-mickey

Well that's it then...I'm putting a crow's nest on...who's got the A3 roof rack's for sale?

Just hope I can turn 'er in time ta miss the berg.

Carbon is good for steel so the soot cancels the sulfur .