In this paper the fracture performance of steels with different levels of cold drawing is studied. Results demonstrated that progressive cold drawing affects clearly the fracture performance, i.e., the most heavily drawn steels exhibit anisotropic fracture behaviour with a change in crack propagation direction which approaches the wire axis or cold drawing direction. At the microscopical level, clear changes are observed in the micrographs with appearances from cleavage-like in the slightly drawn steels to predominant micro-void coalescence in the heavily drawn steels. From the engineering point of view, the fracture toughness of the steels increases with cold drawing.
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