Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Bill Gaber, a senior analyst at U.S. Steel's Research and Technology Center in Munhall, sets a mold into an induction vacuum furnace. U.S. Steel employs 110 researchers and technicians at the site of the company's fabled Homestead Works.

By Len Boselovic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette When Andrew Carnegie decided to celebrate the creation of the world's first billion-dollar corporation with a Jan. 1, 1901, feast for his employees, one of the chefs he called on was Joseph Defilippi.

More than a century later, his grandson, Joseph D. Defilippi, continues cooking things up for U.S. Steel. While his grandfather worked out of the Schenley Hotel kitchen, Mr. Defilippi does his cooking in a laboratory. He is one of 110 researchers and technicians at U.S. Steel's Research and Technology Center in Munhall. The research and development facility is on the site of the steel producer's fabled Homestead Works.

The center's staff of materials scientists and engineers includes 25 Ph.D.s. The scope of their work extends far beyond tinkering with recipes for new grades of steel -- more than 80 percent of steels produced today weren't available 20 years ago, Mr. Defilippi says.

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He works in a so-called Tom Thumb steel plant where new grades of steel, as well as new ways of casting molten steel into slabs, converting the slabs to sheet, and treating, coating and welding the sheet, are tested in small batches. Refractories, the ceramic material that lines furnaces, are tested to see which hold up best to the inferno of steelmaking, the secret to keeping the expensive heart of a mill in production longer.

Experimenting on a small scale makes sense in such a capital-intensive business as steelmaking, where a small mistake on a large scale can be costly.

"We can simulate everything that's done in a steel plant here," said Fred T. Harnack, who heads up U.S. Steel's research effort.

Instead of a furnace that produces a 200-ton to 250-ton "heat" of steel, the center melts batches from 50 pounds to 300 pounds and rolls the miniature slabs on a small rolling mill, not the half-mile-long mill you'd find at the company's Irvin plant.

An 8-foot-high station tests the impact that temperature and other variables have on annealing and galvanizing steel, softening it to make it easier for manufacturers to work with, then applying a thin coat of zinc to it to make it corrosion resistant. The compact operation simulates what happens in the space of 10 stories at Pro-Tec, U.S. Steel's Leipsic, Ohio-based joint venture with Japan's Kobe Steel.

Off in another corner of the lab, steel samples not much bigger than a thumbnail are tested to determine whether they can withstand the temperatures and pressures found 25,000 feet or more deep in the Gulf of Mexico. If they can, the recipes will be sent to company mills that produce piping used by oil and natural gas producers.

Mr. Harnack supervised relocating the center this summer from Monroeville to the Munhall site, originally built to house a $122 million fuel cell manufacturing plant. Moving to the 191,000-square-foot building provided the opportunity to upgrade some equipment, including switching from natural gas-powered steelmaking furnaces to lower cost electric models, Mr. Harnack said.

Much of the staff's effort is directed at developing light-weight yet stronger steels demanded by the automotive industry to improve fuel economy as well as safety. More than 50 new high-strength automotive steels have been developed by U.S. Steel since 2000, Mr. Harnack says.

But the center also has developed glossy, fingerprint-resistant sheet steel to compete against much more expensive stainless steels used in home appliances as well as aluminum and zinc-coated steel for roofing that keeps buildings cool by deflecting the rays of the sun instead of trapping the heat.

"We have a strong dialogue with our end customer," Mr. Defilippi said. "When we develop what they need, there's an order at the end of the process."