Development of Wet Wire Drawing Machine and Pass Schedule With Ultra High Speed for High Carbon Steel Wire

High speed wet wire drawing has become very common for the production of fine high-carbon steel wire (up to 0.70wt%C) because of the increase in customer demand and production rates in real industrial fields. Although the wet wire drawing process is performed at a high speed usually above 1000m/min, greater speed is required to improve productivity. However, in the high-carbon steel wire drawing process, the wire temperature rises greatly as the drawing speed increases. The excessive temperature rise makes the wire more brittle and finally leads to wire breakage. Therefore, the control of wire temperature is very important. In this study, the variations in wire temperature during the high speed wet wire drawing process were investigated. A multi-stage wet wire drawing process with 21 passes, which is used to produce steel wire, was redesigned by considering the increase in temperature. In order to apply the redesigned pass, a new wet wire drawing machine was developed. Through a wet wire drawing experiment with the new drawing machine and the redesigned pass, it was possible to increase the maximum final drawing speed to 2000m/min without the deterioration of the qualities of drawn wire.