Cold drawn steel wires-processing, residual stresses and ductility-part I: metallography and finite element analyses

ABSTRACT Cold drawing steel wires lead to an increase of their mechanical strength and to a drop of their ductility. The increase of their mechanical strength has long been related to the reduction of the various material scales by plastic deformation, but the mechanisms controlling their elongation to failure have received relatively little attention. It is usually found that heavily deformed materials show a tendency to plastic strain localization and necking. However, in this paper it is shown that, though the steel wires are plastically deformed up to strain levels as high as 3.5, a significant capability of plastic deformation is preserved in as‐drawn wires. This apparent contradiction is resolved by the existence of residual stresses inside the wire. Finite element analyses have been conducted in order to show that residual stresses, inherited from the drawing process, are sufficient to produce a significant hardening effect during a post‐drawing tensile test, without introducing any hardening in the local material behaviour. The main conclusion of this paper is that once the material has lost its hardening capabilities, residual stresses, inherited from the process, control the elongation of cold drawn wires. The finite element method allowed also the determination of the residual stress field that would lead to the best agreement between the simulated and the experimental stress strain curve of as‐drawn wires.