Wire & Wire Rods
Steel wire rods has multiple uses and it is extremely important product in the steel industry. Steel wire rods are used as materials to make many other products used in the industries such as:
- Bearings,
- Wire Ropes,
- Cables,
- Wire Mesh,
- Wire Fencing,
- Nails
- Fasteners,
- Springs,
- Chains,
- Tyre Cord,
- Reinforcement in Railway Sleepers,
- Barbed Wires and more such uses.
Steel wire and wire rods are also used in other industries like chemical, power stations, automotive, machine engineering etc.as one of the components to make another product. Wire rods used as hot rolled to make final products and after going through some stages of processing like heat, treatment, wire drawing at specialist plants etc., they are manufactured into machine parts. This is unlike cold-rolled sheets, heavy plates, pipes, sections and other steel products. Wire rods are generally drawn down to a specific diameter before being subjected to forging or other forming operations in secondary processing. The size of the wire rods sometimes is less than minimum size of 5.5 mm which are supplied as rolled, before going through any process. Diameters often range from 5 to 15 mm, mostly complying with the ISO standards, making it easy for the sizes to advance in increments of 1 mm to 20 mm.
All steel wire rods are formed into the coils without any break. This is to ensure that steel wire rods are well-prepared for further processing (usually by heat treating, coating, and cleaning). The coils’ internal diameter often varies from 810 to 910 mm, and the external, from 1100 to 1300 mm(depends on the capability of mill’s equipment). Subsequently, the weight of the coils differs from approximately 600 kg and larger above 2 tons.
A steel plant needs wire rods which is good at processibility and fulfils required properties after processing. Generally each of the wire rod product is developed according to its behaviour at the post-processing stages. Furthermore, since the costs of the post-processing is sometimes several times the price of the wire rods, it is increasingly important to reduce the total integrated manufacturing cost from the steel material to the final product.
Wire Rod Features and Qualities
The most common features are:
Drawing (forming) quality; also known as industrial quality.
Mesh quality;
Cold-heading quality; also known as cold extrusion or cold rolling quality
- Electrode quality;
Other qualities are:
- Chain
- Tire Cord
- Scrap-less
- Fine Wire
- Lead
- Music Spring
- Concrete Reinforcement
- Industrial and Standard
- Thermal
- Cold Finishing
- Welding
6 DIFFERENT TYPES OF STEEL WIRE
Steel wire is a multi-purpose material that can be found in everyday uses like home, car, offices, also useful in commercial, industrial and military applications—for cleaning, for spring-loaded devices, for reinforcing, for structural integrity, and even for making music.
Steel wire is manufactured to different levels of strength, elasticity and thickness. It is used for different purpose, not every wire can be used.
HARD-DRAWN WIRE
This is steel wire that has simply been drawn to a certain diameter without any additional treatment or tempering. Good for bending into wire forms or springs, but it is unable to endure high amounts of stress the way music wire does. Often used in products like metal baskets, shopping carts, safety pins and some auto parts.
DUCT WIRE
This is a flexible coated wire that is commonly used to provide structure and flexibility, such as with heating and air ducts that have to curve around corners while retaining their shape.
PATENT WIRE
Patenting refers to a specific treatment process by which steel wire is heated and quenched to make it stronger and more durable. Patent wire is useful for high tension applications and for wire rope.
LOW CARBON STEEL WIRE
High carbon content makes steel strong, but at the expense of flexibility. For applications where the wire needs to bend more easily, (like low-stress springs or coat hangers) low carbon steel is a better option.
BROOM WIRE
Most commonly used in the brushes of street cleaners, broom wire is usually a strong, high-carbon wire that is galvanized or PVC coated to endure repeated friction.
CHROME SILICON WIRE
This steel alloy wire is cold-drawn and heat-treated to be exceptionally strong, able to withstand shock and high-impact loads that the typical wire spring could not withstand. It’s an excellent choice for recoil springs in guns or in high performance vehicles.
General characterises of the Wire Rod Products:
- Grades vary from standardised ordinary grades for general applications to high quality grades for high-end applications. Specifications are individually defined for every user or customer. Mainly for the manufacturing industries and automobile. The high-end products are for safety-related applications, typically for automobile engines, drive train systems and chassis, have high strength and are used as functional materials. Wire rod steel products are semi-finished products, which are rarely used as hot rolled, and they are manufactured into final product after secondary and even ternary processing such as forging, heat treatment and machining, industrial products for which they are used are subject to competition in the global
Wire rods are used in a wide range of industrial market. Therefore they have to contain properties of strength, ductility, cold formability, drawability, and harden-ability. In addition, current market demands some additional properties in the wire rods which are:
(i) ultra- precision dimensional tolerances and ovality,
(ii) lower scale loss,
(iii) negative tolerances (in sectional weight),
(iv) no variation in dimensions throughout the length of the wire rod,
(v) uniform physical properties, and
(vi) uniform weight with nominal variation between front, middle and back end.
Wire rod quality has become increasingly important these days. For many application of wire rods. It is important that the wire rods have surfaces without any marks, scratches, shells, cracks, overfills, and oxide particles.