Production and Examination of Colour-Galvanized Steel Test Sheets by Modern Analytical Methods

Nowadays the most commonly used baths for hot-dip galvanizing are the ones which contain about 0.1 ... 0.2% of aluminium. Besides aluminium, the effects of the addition of small quantities of titanium (up to 0.0005%) to the bath have recently been studied in detail by Culcasi et al. [2]. They proved the strong impact of adding a small amount of titanium on the development of the iron-zinc layer, which influences primarily the building up of the intermetallic compound film Fe2Al5 on the surface of the steel piece in contact with the molten zinc. This aluminium-alloyed hot-dip bath with titanium usually does not form a nicely coloured surface [. Therefore, our experiments were limited to test only the effect of adding titanium to the molten zinc which contains only traces of aluminium in order to study the impact of titanium on surface colouring using GD-OES spectrometry.