Why is stainless steel called stainless

Lower quality of stainless steel usually is porous which means if it comes into contact with certain corrosive and stain-prone elements like coffee or tea. It must be emphasized though that even the lower quality stainless steel will not rust but will look worn down because of the stains. For industrial grade stainless steel, it is imperative that high quality stainless steel be used because it should last more than one lifetime. The chromium content should meet a minimum requirement to produce enough chromium oxide layers on the surface of the stainless steel.

Chromium oxide is an inorganic compound that is used to block air on stainless steel to prevent corrosion. It doesn't explain what I want to know. Is stainless steel an American word? Wikipedia says of stainless steel that stainless steel is "also known as inox steel or inox from French inoxydable ". As is well known, and mentioned in Wikipedia, stainless steel stains less easily and rusts or corrodes less easily, than ordinary steel, but it is not stain-proof and in some conditions can rust or corrode or give such appearance.

For example, after a stainless steel surface is cleaned with steel wool rather than brass wool, it may develop rust stains. Etymonline gives a date of origin of the term and says stainless steel is "so called because it is highly resistant to rust or tarnish. Wikipedia includes part of a New York Times article that refers to "a stainless steel" that is "claimed to be non-rusting, unstainable, and untarishable" [sic] which at least partly confutes the "stains less" etymology of stainless steel , which is suggested in the stainless-online.

With respect to American vs. British usage of stainless steel and inox steel , ngrams shows little difference between the corpuses, and in both cases inox has nearly no usage compared with stainless steel :. Generally it's known as stainless steel, sometimes in engineering it's called corrosion resistant steel but if you are being that specific you would just use the alloy number anyway eg.

I suspect stainless rather than rust-free because it was originally expensive and mostly used for cutlery or jewelry rather than engineering applications. The first stainless for household use was marketed by its English inventor as Staybrite.

Don't know who first used the word stainless - there are 3 main types of stainless steel and each form was invented almost simultaneously in Germany, England and America. Stainless steel is in use in both varieties. Etymonline gives its origin as. I think of stain as a more general term, which can refer to any sort of blemish or discoloration.

It tends to connote that the discoloration is permanent or at least difficult to remove. A clothing stain is one example.

Rust or corrosion on a piece of metal is another. It doesn't necessarily have to refer to undesirable discoloration: stain also refers to the process of staining wood , for example to make a cheap light wood look like an expensive dark wood.

However, in the case of metal, most people would probably prefer to use rust. Stainless steel , as others have suggested, was probably chosen as a marketing name because it sounds better.

In the U. I had never heard the term "inox" until your post. When metal is exposed to and reacts with the dry gas and nonelectrolyte solution, it will produce corrosion. The corrosion is known as chemical corrosion. The chemical corrosion product exists on the metal surface, without any current being generated during the corrosion process.

If the compounds produced by the chemical corrosion are stable, not easy to evaporate and dissolve, of dense tissue and binding strongly with metal matrix, the corrosion products will stay attached to the metal surface to form a passivation layer, hence to protect the metal matrix from further corrosion. This behavior is known as "passivation effect. On the contrary, if the compounds are unstable, volatile or dissolved, not bonding with the metal strongly, the corrosion products will be peeling off layer by layer, like the oxide, hence unable to protect the metal matrix from further corrosion.

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