The microstructure and mechanical properties of drawn and aged pearlitic steel wires

Abstract

Cold-drawn pearlitic steel wires exhibit the highest strength amongst steel products for commercially use. The microstructure and the mechanical properties of wires are influenced by the drawing and post-drawing aging process. The transition of lamellar structure, e.g. cementite fragmentation, dissolution and re-precipitation, ferrite refinement, by drawing and recovery and recrystallisation by aging are summarised. In addition, the corresponding changes in mechanical properties, e.g. yield strength, delamination, hydrogen embrittlement and fatigue are summarised.

Preferable Resistance against Hydrogen Embrittlement of Pearlitic Steel Deformed by Caliber Rolling

“…Drawn pearlitic steel is one of the most important steels because it has the highest tensile strength in bulk steels. 1,2) Many research works have been conducted to clarify the physical phenomena behind the superior strength of deformed pearlite, such as the morphological change during drawing 3,4) or cold rolling, 5) texture evolution, 3,6,7) cementite decomposition, 8,9) interaction between solute-carbon and delamination, 10,11) stress partitioning examined by in-situ diffraction. 12,13) These research works have brought deeper understanding about the strength of deformed pearlite, with the recent progress of the microstructural characterization of as-transformed pearlite.…”

“…[14][15][16][17] The aggressive activity of the research for the deformed pearlite must be motivated by additional engineering benefits, one of which is the superior hydrogen embrittlement (HE) resistance. 2,18) HE is the serious problem for high strengthened steels for long time. 19) The mechanism of the superiority of pearlitic steel has been studied by several researchers: one of the previous papers has pointed out that the fiber structure in the drawn pearlite prevents the hydrogen-induced cracking from propagation, 18) and actually this suggestion inspired the invention of the superior HE proper-ties of the tempformed steels with deformed lath martensite structure.…”

Mechanical Properties and Texture Evolution of High-Carbon Steel Wires during Wire Drawing: Strand Manufacturing

“…It can be seen that there is almost no plastic deformation at the final wire. It is well known that work hardening rate is dependent on tensile strength and deformation, and this leads certainly to the rising of work hardening rate as a function of drawing strain [16,26,27].…”

Editorial

“…This special issue contains a range of topics, all related to strong pearlitic wires. It begins with a nice review of the range of properties required, written by an author who has formidable industrial experience [7]. There are other papers which fall between what might be called basic work and classical structure-property studies.…”

“…For example, the fact that diffusible hydrogen is bad for steel has been known since 1875 [8], but the role of trapped and diffusible hydrogen on fatigue properties has been deduced really quite nicely by Minoshima et al [9]. This latter work is included in the review by Yamasaki [7], but I think it is worth studying the detailed experiments and clever interpretations presented in the original paper [9].…”