Strain Hardening & Annealing

Dr.A.K.Das
Mechanical Engineering
BML Munjal University

Concepts to be learnt

Have you ever thought of few pertinent questions:

Why does bending a copper wire makes it harder
Certain types of steels improves crashworthiness of cars
What is the difference between annealed, tempered, zone toughened & laminated
glass
How is bullet proof glass made
Why do thermoplastics gets stronger when it is strained
How is that the strength of metals around a weld is lower than surrounding base
metal
Many such examples..
In this chapter we shall learn how the strength of metals & alloys is influenced by
mechanical processing & heat treatment.

Relationship between Cold Working to

the Stress Strain Curve

We begin by discussing strain hardening in metallic materials in the context of

stress strain curve.
A stress-strain curve is shown below
A stress S1> Yield strength Sy is applied. When the stress is removed, strain e1
remains in the material

Cold working

If we make test sample form previously strained material, that has

already been plastically, then we get a stress strain curve as:This new test sample will start to deform plastically or flow at
stress level S1
We define the flow stress as the stress that is needed to initiate
the plastic flow in previously deformed metals
If we continue to apply a stress until we reach a level S2 then
release the stress & retest the material, the new flow stress is S2

.contd..

Strain Hardening

Each time we apply higher stress the flow stress & tensile
strength increases & ductility decreases.
We eventually strengthening the metallic material until the
flow stress, tensile & breaking strengths are equal & there
is no ductility.
Beyond this point the material cannot be deformed
plastically further.
Thus the principle of Strain Hardening is to stress the
material beyond its yield limit.

Industrial Implementation

By applying stress more than original Yield limit of the metallic material, we have the
Strain Hardened or Cold Worked material. Some manufacturing process that uses both
cold & hot working process are shown below.
Rolling
(Hot or Cold)

Extrusion

Wire drawing
(Hot or Cold)

Forging & Stamping

(Cold: Coining)

Mechanism of Work Hardening

Strain hardening (also called work-hardening or cold-working) is the

process of making a metal harder and stronger through plastic
deformation. When a metal is plastically deformed, dislocations move
and additional dislocations are generated. The more dislocations
within a material, the more grains will interact and become tangled.
This will result in a decrease in the mobility of the dislocations and a
strengthening of the material. This type of strengthening is commonly
called cold-working. It is called cold-working because the plastic
deformation must occurs at a temperature low enough that atoms
cannot rearrange themselves. When a metal is worked at higher
temperatures (hot-working) the dislocations can rearrange and little
strengthening is achieved.
It should be understood, however, that increasing the strength by
cold-working will also result in a reduction in ductility. The graph to
the right shows the yield strength and the % elongation as a function
of % cold-work for a few example materials. Notice that for each
material, a small amount of cold-working results in a significant
reduction in ductility.

Effects of Elevated Temperature on

Strain Hardened Materials

When strain hardened materials are exposed to elevated temperatures, the

strengthening that resulted from the plastic deformation can be lost. This can be a
bad thing if the strengthening is needed to support a load. However, strengthening
due to strain hardening is not always desirable, especially if the material is being
heavily formed since ductility will be lowered.
Heat treatment can be used to remove the effects of strain hardening. Three things
can occur during heat treatment:
Recovery
Recrystallization
Grain growth

Recovery

When a stain hardened material is held at an elevated temperature an increase in

atomic diffusion occurs that relieves some of the internal strain energy. Remember
that atoms are not fixed in position but can move around when they have enough
energy to break their bonds.
Diffusion increases rapidly with rising temperature and this allows atoms in severely
strained regions to move to unstrained positions. In other words, atoms are freer to
move around and recover a normal position in the lattice structure. This is known as
the recovery phase and it results in an adjustment of strain on a microscopic scale.
Internal residual stresses are lowered due to a reduction in the dislocation density
and a movement of dislocation to lower-energy positions. The tangles of dislocations
condense into sharp two-dimensional boundaries and the dislocation density within
these areas decrease. These areas are called sub grains.
There is no appreciable reduction in the strength and hardness of the material but
corrosion resistance often improves.

Recrystallization

At a higher temperature, new, strain-free grains nucleate and grow inside the old
distorted grains and at the grain boundaries. These new grains grow to replace the
deformed grains produced by the strain hardening. With recrystallization, the
mechanical properties return to their original weaker and more ductile states.
Recrystallization depends on the temperature, the amount of time at this
temperature and also the amount of strain hardening that the material experienced.
The more strain hardening, the lower the temperature will be at which
recrystallization occurs. Also, a minimum amount (typically 2-20%) of cold work is
necessary for any amount of recrystallization to occur.
The size the new grains is also partially dependant on the amount of strain
hardening. The greater the stain hardening, the more nuclei for the new grains, and
the resulting grain size will be smaller (at least initially).

Grain Growth

If a specimen is left at the high

temperature beyond the time
needed for complete
recrystallization, the grains begin to
grow in size. This occurs because
diffusion occurs across the grain
boundaries and larger grains have
less grain boundary surface area
per unit of volume. Therefore, the
larger grains lose fewer atoms and
grow at the expense of the smaller
grains. Larger grains will reduce the
strength and toughness of the
material.

Strain-Hardening Exponent

The response of a metallic material to cold working is given by

the strain-hardening exponent, which is the slope of the plastic
portion of the true stress-strain curve. This is defined by the
relationship;

Constant K (strength coefficient) is equal to stress when n=1

When a logarithmic scale is used;

Larger degrees of strengthening are obtained for a given strain

as n increases (shown in Figure).
For metals, strain hardening is the result of the dislocation
interaction.
The strain hardening exponent is relatively low for HCP metals,
but higher for BCC & particularly for FCC metals.
Metals with low strain hardening exponent poorly respond to
cold working.

The metals with low &

high strain hardening
exponent.

Strain Rate Sensitivity

The strain-rate sensitivity (m) of stress is defined as;

This describes how the flow stress changes with strain rate.
The strain rate sensitivity for crystalline metals are typically less than 0.1 but increases with
temperature.
Mechanical behaviour is important for applications like crash worthiness where the body
need to harden rapidly under impact loading.

Formability

High values of m & n mean that the material can exhibit better formability in
stretching.
However these values do not affect deep drawing characteristics. For deep
drawing, the Plastic Strain Ratio is important, which is defined as;

Where w & h corresponds to width & thickness of the material being processed and
the subscript 0 indicates the original dimension.
Forming limit diagrams are used to better understanding of Formability of metallic
products.

Properties vs Cold Work

By controlling the amount of cold work, we can control strain hardening. The
amount of deformation is defined by percent of cold work as,

Where Ao & Af are original & final cross section area.

Percent reduction of thickness,

Where to & tf are original & final sheet thickness.

The effect of cold work & properties variation is illustrated through an example
below.

Example-1
Prob: A 1 cm thick copper plate is cold rolled to 0.5 cm & later further reduced to 0.16
cm. Determine the total % of cold work & tensile strength of cold worked plate. The
width is kept fixed during rolling.

Solution-1
Solution: The % CW can be calculated using

The effect of cold work

on mechanical
properties of copper

Example-2

Prob: Design a manufacturing system to produce a 0.1 cm thick copper plate having at
least 60,000 psi Yield strength & not exceeding 65,000 psi YS and 5% elongation.
Soln: From the figure above, we need at least 45% CW to produce a YS of 65 Kpsi
and 40% CW to obtain 60 Kpsi, but we need 45% CW to get 5% elongation. Therefore
any CW between 45 to 40% will meet required mechanical properties.
Therefore the range of initial plate thickness would be;

Thus the initial thickness should be between 0.182 to 0.167 cm to get the required
properties & thickness 0.1 cm.

Example-3
Prob: Design a process to produce 0.2 in diameter copper wire.
Soln: Assume the starting diameter of the wire is 0.4 in & the wire is in soft condition.
The amount of CW can be calculated as;

From the figure, the initial strength with 0% CW is 22 Kpsi. The final YS with 75% CW
is 80 Kpsi (with very little ductility).
The draw for required to stretch the initial wire is;
The stress acting on the wire after passing through die is;

Example-3

(contd)

Grain structure of low carbon steel

produced by cold working

10% CW

30% CW

60% CW

90% CW

Grain structure refinement during

Hot/Cold working