Barkhausen noise emission in over-stressed steel wires

•Barkhausen noise is sensitive to the wires over-stressing.•Increasing over-stressing decreases Barkhausen noise emission.•Barkhausen noise decreases with tensile stress due to induced anisotropies. This paper deals with the monitoring of steel wires used for pre-stressed concrete steel strands and their over-stressing. These components, as the main bearing elements, represent high-strength structures that are usually pre-stressed in bridge constructions. This study employs the Barkhausen noise technique to prevent the over-stressing of these wires and demonstrates that Barkhausen noise emission decreases remarkably with increasing degree of over-stressing. It was found that over-stressing beyond the yield strength increases dislocation density, which in turn increases interference between the domain walls in motion. Increasing the pinning strength of the matrix reduces Barkhausen noise emission and an increasing degree of over-stressing can be directly linked with irreversible alteration of Barkhausen noise and extracted parameters such as the number of Barkhausen pulses and their magnitude as well as Barkhausen noise envelopes.