Open Access Conference Proceedings

This paper deals with the evolution of plastic properties of steel wire for steel ropes during cold drawing. The evolution and final values of properties of drawn wire are dictated by the drawing process conditions. One of the most important factors among them is the amount of reduction per pass, and thus the total number of passes. The drawing process was performed using three types of pass schedules. The pass schedules varied in the amount of single-pass reduction and, naturally, in the number of passes. The first one was a standard schedule (7 passes) used in drawing mills, two others were experimental (6 and 5 passes). The principle was a decreasing in the number of passes and thus an increase in the single-pass reduction, while maintaining the total reduction. In this paper, we describe the influence of the amount of single-pass reduction on the final plastic properties (number of revolutions to fracture and number of bending cycles to fracture). Tensile test and metallographic analysis were also conducted. The impact of the pass schedule type on the numbers of bending cycles and revolutions to fracture was insignificant. The most profound impact was that of the pass schedule type on the maximum shear strain to fracture in torsion tests, where cementite lamellae began to bend due to the wire drawing.

Keywords: wire drawing, wire for steel ropes, pass schedule, plastic properties, simple torsion test, reverse bend test

© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.