PSI - Issue 81

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 81 (2026) 135–139

© 2026 The Authors. Copy from the contract: Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of DMDP 2025 organizers Keywords : pearlitic steel; steelmaking; manufacturing; cold drawing; anisotropic fracture behaviour; fracture micromechanisms. 1. Introduction High-strength prestressing steel wires for civil engineering use in prestressed concrete structures are manufactured by cold drawing a previously hot rolled pearlitic steel bar in several passes to increase the yield strength. The steelmaking process in the form of progressive cold drawing produces important plastic deformations in the material and activates a strain hardening mechanism which is responsible for the extremely high yield strength useful for structural engineering. This heavy drawing also produces microstructural effects in the steel with potential consequences in the matter of fatigue and fracture behaviour. Therefore, although the classical mechanical properties (yield strength, ultimate tensile stress) of high-strength cold drawn pearlitic steels are improved during the steelmaking procedure, further research is needed to provide more insight into the effects of this manufacture method on fracture. In this paper the fracture performance of steels with intermediate levels of cold drawing is studied under triaxial stress states produced by crack-like defects. Thus the drawing intensity (or straining level, or degree of strain hardening, given by the number of cold drawing steps undergone by the steels) is treated as the fundamental variable to elucidate the effects of the manufacturing route on the posterior fracture performance of the material. Abstract The paper studies the anisotropy of crack-induced fracture behaviour in heavily cold drawn pearlitic steels supplied as prestressing steel wires for prestressed concrete. Results demonstrated that progressive cold drawing affects clearly the fracture performance of the steel wires, so that the most heavily drawn steels exhibit anisotropic fracture behaviour with crack deflection , i.e., a change in crack propagation direction that deviates from the original mode I propagation and approaches the wire axis or cold drawing direction (mixed mode propagation). VIII International Conference “In -service Damage of Materi als: Diagnostics and Prediction” (DMDP 2025) Anisotropy of crack-induced fracture behaviour in cold drawn pearlitic steels in the form of prestressing wires: A Tribute to Andrea Mantegna Jesús Toribio* Fracture & Structural Integrity Research Group (FSIRG), University of Salamanca (USAL) E.P.S., Campus Viriato, Avda. Requejo 33, 49022 Zamora, Spain

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +34-677566723; fax: +34-980545002. E-mail address: toribio@usal.es

2452-3216 © 2026 The Authors. Copy from the contract: Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of DMDP 2025 organizers 10.1016/j.prostr.2026.03.024