Effects of the strain-hardening law in the numerical simulation of wire drawing processes

Residual stress profiles in a cold drawn steel wire are calculated by means of a Finite Element technique. Since the wire points are subjected, during drawing, to a non-monotonic loading path, an accurate description of cyclic plasticity is essential, in these analyses. It is demonstrated that the commonly adopted assumption of isotropic hardening for steel is inadequate, for the calculation both of accurate residual stress profiles and of other significant mechanical quantities, even in the case of a single-pass drawing.