Book excerpt: One of two self-contained volumes belonging to the newly revised Steel Heat Treatment Handbook, Second Edition, this book examines the behavior and processes involved in modern steel heat treatment applications. Steel Heat Treatment: Metallurgy and Technologies presents the principles that form the basis of heat treatment processes while incorporating detailed descriptions of advances emerging since the 1997 publication of the first edition. Revised, updated, and expanded, this book ensures up-to-date and thorough discussions of how specific heat treatment processes and different alloy elements affect the structure and the classification and mechanisms of steel transformation, distortion of properties of steel alloys. The book includes entirely new chapters on heat-treated components, and the treatment of tool steels, stainless steels, and powder metallurgy steel components. Steel Heat Treatment: Metallurgy and Technologies provides a focused resource for everyday use by advanced students and practitioners in metallurgy, process design, heat treatment, and mechanical and materials engineering.