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Final Year Project

Description: Hobbyist blacksmithing is becoming increasingly popular, however new
steel can be expensive and difficult to source. Blacksmiths will rely on “found” steel
objects that can be reforged. There are sophisticated techniques available to
commercial organizations that can categorize the elements in an alloy, but these can be
too expensive for a hobbyist. Hobbyists and even professional blacksmiths rely on
empirical techniques to determine steel composition. This project is to research and test
those techniques and compare the results with manufacturer’s values or laboratory
assay.

Short description: Research and test economical methods for determining the
elemental composition of steel alloys.

Category: Experimental.

Why project is important:

Knowing the composition of an alloy will help determine the treatments that produce
the best properties.

Final Year Project 1

 Influencing alloy’s properties is essential to successfully building the wanted project.

Knowing the composition can help determine the atomic structure of the material,
and the more advanced properties of the material.

Accurately determining elemental composition of found/scrap metals/alloys results

in better recycling.

Knowing the composition of an alloy can save a hobbyist blacksmith/tinkerer from

working with dangerous substances.

Having an affordable method for accurately determining elemental composition of

alloys can open the door for many aspiring engineers and hobbyist builders.

Initial plan: Perform relatively low-cost, simple tests to determine some of the alloy’s
properties (mechanical, thermal, magnetic, optical, etc.) (and any low-cost tests for
finding atomic arrangement) and leverage machine learning to use the raw data to
predict the alloy’s elemental composition (or help classify it based on elements’
concentrations). The machine learning model can learn from existing databases which
contain the properties of alloys and its’ corresponding elemental composition.

Starting point of the project:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/f5c30005-61f3-42
c9-b470-d6aa2120b425/How_to_Identify_Scrap_Metals.pdf

Weekly progress:
Week 3

Final Year Project 2