Use of ball indentation technique to determine the change of tensile properties of SS316L steel due to cold rolling

In the present work, ball indentation technique (BIT) has been employed to explore the possibilities for revealing the effect of cold rolling on mechanical properties on a SS316L steels. The as-received steel was cold rolled up to 40%. Results are presented for 7%, 15%, 24% and 40% of cold rolling effect on the SS316L steels. For all the specimen tested, the dependence of yield strength (YS), ultimate tensile strength (UTS), strength coefficient (K) and strain hardening component (n) values on cold rolling effect were made available from the BI results and they were validated with the standard conventional mechanical test results. It was found that, with increase in cold rolling the YS, UTS and K values have increased as revealed by BIT, while n value has decreased. Overall, it is found that BIT can be effectively used to determine the change of mechanical properties after cold working by using a small amount of test materials and quite rapidly compared to conventional test. An in-house developed BI system was employed to evaluate the mechanical properties.