Effect of Cold Drawing on Microstructure and Corrosion Performance of High-Strength Steel

Abstract

This paper deals with the effect of cold drawing on a high-strength steel in wire form with pearlitic microstructure. Cold drawing produces a preferential orientation of the pearlite lamellae aligned parallel to the cold drawing direction, resulting in anisotropic properties with regard to fracture behaviour in air and aggressive environments (stress corrosion cracking). While the hot rolled bar has a randomly oriented microstructure in both transverse and longitudinal sections, the fully drawn wire presents a randomly oriented appearance in the transverse cross-section, but a marked orientation in the longitudinal cross-section. These microstructural characteristics affect the time-dependent behaviour of the steels when a crack is present in a corrosive or hydrogen environment and influences both the subcritical crack growth rate, the time to failure and the crack propagation path. It is shown that in the strongly drawn steels the crack changes its propagation path, and a micromechanical model is proposed to explain this behaviour.