Abstract
Ultrafine-grained structure was produced in the Accumulative Angular Drawing (AAD) process in which the complex strain path was applied. The microalloyed steel wire rods were produced using multi-pass wire drawing process where the high strain accumulation is used as a way to achieve much higher microstructure refinement level compared to the conventional wire drawing (WD) process. The wires after both AAD process and WD process were examined in order to assess mechanical properties and microstructure development. In order to evaluate the effects of complex deformation on microstructure development and mechanical properties of the drawn wires, a numerical model of the torsion tests was applied using Abaqus software. The cyclic torsion tests were performed to study the effects of the applied hardening rule – described as a function of dislocations density and the accuracy of the prediction of material behaviour subjected to strain path change during AAD. It has been shown that an additional advantage of presented approach is its capability of tracking evolution of dislocation density during the deformation process. The initial dislocation densities used in the performed calculations were taken from the microstructural analysis using high resolution EBSD. During strain reversal, annihilation of the dislocations (Bauschinger effect) is a common phenomenon that leads to the decrease in dislocation density and affects the final strength. Finally, based on the proposed constitutive description, multiscale finite element modelling combined with Digital Material Representation (DMR) was used as a tool for prediction of the deformation and microstructure inhomogeneity in the drawn wires.