First Paper: The Effect of Heat Treatment on the Ductility of Alloy Steel Wires in a Cold Heading Process
Longitudinal grooves of various depths ranging from 0.001 in to 0.011 in were machined on the cylindrical surface of steel slugs prior to carrying out an automatic two-stage transfer heading operation. The longitudinal grooves were used to estimate the ‘critical groove depth’, which was defined as the depth of longitudinal groove that contained a ductile fracture crack just on the point of ‘opening out’ at the end of the heading process, thus giving a measure of the ductility of the wire. A half-replicate of a two-level factorial experiment was carried out to assess the effects and interactions of annealing temperature, annealing time, cooling rate and ageing temperature on the ductility of four different types of 1/2 in diameter cold heading steel wire. The results show that certain types of steel wires have optimum ductility in the ‘as-received’, cold-drawn, state. Other types of steel are shown to respond favourably to process annealing treatments, in which case annealing at 700°C for 1 hour followed by air cooling should give optimum ductility. It is shown that there is no general correlation between decreasing hardness and increasing ductility for steel wire.