The effect of a non-circular drawing sequence on delamination characteristics of pearlitic steel wire

•A non-circular drawing (NCD) was applied to produce high-torsional ductility wire.•In the NCD, two processing routes were defined as the NCDA and NCDB, respectively.•The NCDB could impose relatively homogeneous plastic deformation on the wire.•A strength level of 2300 MPa wire was produced by the NCDB without delamination.

In this study, a non-circular drawing (NCD) sequence was applied to investigate the effect of deformation behavior, microstructure and texture evolution on delamination characteristics of pearlitic steel wire under torsional deformation mode. The multi-pass NCD sequence was numerically and experimentally applied up to the 12th pass in comparison with conventional wire drawing (WD). For investigation of the deformation characteristics of the drawn wires, three-dimensional finite element and flownet analyses were carried out. These simulation results indicated that the NCD could impose relatively homogeneous plastic deformation on the wire compared to the WD. From the scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction results, globular cementite and cylindrical texture component, which might increase likeliness of delamination fracture, were rarely observed in the NCD drawn wire. In the torsion test, the delamination fracture was observed in the WD drawn wire for the 10th pass while it did not occur for the 12th pass NCD. In addition, the ultimate tensile strength (UTS) of 2300 MPa grade wire was manufactured by the NCD and the UTS value was 257 MPa higher than the one of the WD. Therefore, it was demonstrated that the multi-pass NCD could impose relatively homogeneous plastic deformation on the wire, resulting in high-torsional ductility with better strength compared to the WD.