Suppose that you want to select French (AFNOR) steels with chrome (Cr) content between 8 and 12% and carbon (C) content between 0.05 and 0.3%.

First you have to choose a search option. To select materials by chemical composition (elements: Cr and C), you are using Advanced Search option.

To define the search criteria, you select France (AFNOR ) from the country's pop-up list. To define chemical composition criterion, check Cr and C. Then fields for values became enabled, and you can enter 8 for minimum and 12 for maximum Cr value and 0.05 for minimum and 0.3 for maximum C value.

After you click Submit button, Key to Steel will find all French steels that fulfil given criteria and display them in the list. Among many French steels, search engine selects materials with the carbon between 0.05 and 0.3% and chrome between 8 and 12% in a few seconds! Compare it again with the amount of time you will need if you use books.

Selecting materials by chemical composition generally results in list of steel materials that satisfy given criteria. The length of the list depends on criteria you gave.

When several elements are given as a search condition, or when chemical composition is combined with the other criteria, resulting list of materials can be quite short.

Otherwise, it can have up to 500 materials, and it is displayed in pages. By using navigation buttons, you can navigate through the pages, jump to the beginning or the end of the list or go to specific page.

In this case you have less than 10 materials that satisfy search condition.

If you are interested in properties of some specific material from the list, you can click on its designation. In order to find out how to view material properties, please refer to steps 4, 5 and 6 of Tour 1.