Niobium Microalloyed Cold Heading Steel Wire Rods without Heat

Treatment for Fastener Applications

Dr Vishwanathan Nagarajan, Ferro Tech India Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai
Email: vishwanathan@ferrotechindia.com

Abstract
Materials for fastener applications like bolts have traditionally been made using alloy steels by
classical method of annealing, cold heading, quenching and tempering, and final surface treatment.
Alternatively, low carbon microalloyed cold heading quality (CHQ) steel wire rods have been
developed that does not need the expensive annealing and post forming hardening heat treatment,
resulting in significant savings on energy, material cost and cycle time. This paper reviews the
processing, salient features and the associated benefits of such low carbon microalloyed CHQ steels
over the conventional quenched and tempered (Q&T) fastener steels.

Introduction
Microalloyed steels consume about 80% of the world niobium (Nb) production and of these nearly
90% of the microalloyed steels are hot rolled flat products. Even though niobium has been the most
preferred microalloying element in the above applications for several decades, its use in the
engineering steels was relatively limited. However, customers and component manufacturers have
been showing growing interest in the use of this proven technology, from the flat products, to help
achieve improved mechanical properties and on-field performance of the engineering components
[1]. The application of Nb and hence the strength levels of engineering structural steel parts, like the
heat treated steels for fastener, spring and case hardened parts used in the automobiles have
significantly increased in the last two decades. One of the earliest developments of microalloying in
the long products was steel wire rods for cold heading applications.
Cold heading is a process used for producing a variety of components such as fasteners, studs, small
crank shafts, steering rods, etc., for use in automotive, construction, aerospace, railway, mining and
electrical product industries. The term cold heading refers to the process of cold working of a blank
from a steel wire rod where impact compressive forces are employed on one end of the rod blank to
form a head. It is a forming process that is performed without an external heat source and involves
applying a force to the free end of the metal workpiece contained between a die and a punch. Cold
heading can be considered as a high velocity deformation process with strain rates exceeding 100 s-1.
The component manufacturing process using conventional cold heading steels consists of several
stages of operations. The hot rolled medium carbon wire rod steel is first given a spherodizing
annealing treatment to soften the steel in order to be able to carry out cold forming operations such
as wire drawing and cold heading, and later a quenching and tempering (Q&T) treatment is given to
obtain the desired mechanical properties, followed by any surface treatments that is needed, as
shown in Fig. 1. Traditionally Q&T steels containing 0.20-0.40%C are used for these applications
wherein, the carbon offers the required hardness and the alloying elements offer hardenability. The

popular AISI steel grades for cold heading applications are 10XX, 10BXX, 13XX, 15XX, 40XX, 41XX,
51XX and 86XX, where XX refers to the amount of carbon present in the steel.

Fig. 1 Illustration of a typical cold heading process using a conventional CHQ steel

Spheroidization annealing heat treatment is given to spheroidize the lamellar cementite structure
for improving the ductility of the steel decreases the tool wear and failure. However, there are two
main drawbacks of the traditional cold heading process:

The process of spheroidising and Q&T are very energy intensive and time consuming. Also,
depending on the (section) size of the component, the steel may need alloying elements to
improve its hardenability. These material and processing cost contributions can add to the
final cost of the part, making the process expensive and time consuming.

Even though the tempered martensite microstructure obtained after the Q&T treatment
offers the required high strength, the microstructure suffers from areas of non-uniformity,
quench cracking, distortion and delayed fracture under static loading conditions due to
hydrogen pick-up during surface treatment operations like plating.

The drive for reducing the energy costs and improving the service performance of the components
led to the development of an alternative steels that are low in carbon and microalloyed with
niobium (Nb) and boron (B).

Development of Microalloyed CHQ Steels

The steels required for cold heading process are required to exhibit the following characteristics: 1)
sufficient ductility to be able to fill the die cavity and not fracture during cold forming; 2) sufficient
strength in the final form for load bearing and fatigue resistance, and; 3) sufficient toughness in the
final form to resist fracture during service in the presence of unavoidable or undetectable flaws.
A good alternative material for cold forming application would be a steel that does not rely on
carbon for its strength but rather on its microstructure. The already proven concept of low carbon
steels in the flat products, microalloyed with B and/or Nb, was found interesting and hence was
applied to the long products applications like fasteners [2]. Boron has a strong influence on

hardenability of the steel [3]. Boron strongly inhibits the austenite-to-ferrite transformation and
favours the lower transformation products like degenerate pearlite or upper bainite. On the other
hand, the addition of niobium offers higher strengthening effect via multiple mechanisms: 1) grain
size refinement; 2) depression of austenite-to-ferrite transformation temperature, and; 3)
precipitation strengthening. While the combined addition of Nb and B can lead to a strong
synergistic effect, between the two elements, in delaying the austenite-to-ferrite transformation as
shown in Fig. 2 [4], that can be utilised to achieve uniform low carbon bainitic microstructures in
fairly thick sections even by air cooling. The low bainitic microstructure thus obtained can provide
good combination of strength, ductility and toughness.

Fig. 2 CCT Curves of C-Mn, C-Mn-B, C-Mn-Nb and C-Mn-Nb-B steels showing the influence of composition on the onset
(5%) of transformation (adapted from [4]).

A study on the effect of B, Nb and B+Nb in a low carbon steel to analyse their cold heading
characteristics showed excellent values for percentage elongation during wire drawing as can be
seen in Fig. 3 [5]. These steels were first controlled rolled as wire rods, to much lower finishing
temperatures (~840 C) and controlled cooled to obtain the low carbon bainitic microstructure. The
work hardening behaviour is of importance because the strength levels required for the desired
fastener grades can be obtained by cold working. The C-Mn-B steel required a minimum elongation
of 50% on the as-rolled wire to reach tensile strength levels and remained in the range of 800-1000
MPa, which is required by SAE class 8-8 bolts, up to 300% elongation. The C-Mn-Nb-B steel, on the
other hand, with dislocation density in it bainitic microstructure with some martensite-austenite
(MA) islands work hardened much better than the C-Mn-B steel and reached the tensile strength
level as required by SAE class 10-9 bolts after ~60% elongation and remained in the range for large
strains. It is important to note that the residual ductility for further cold heading was always above
40%, which indicates that there was still excellent cold heading ductility left in the blank at all strain
levels throughout the cold heading process [4].

Fig. 3 Work hardening behaviour of as-rolled wire rods of C-Mn-B, C-Mn-Nb and C-Mn-Nb-B steels [5]

Comparison of strength levels of the bolts produced using low carbon niobium microalloyed bainitic
steels and the conventional Q&T steel is shown in Fig. 4. Although the low carbon bainitic steel
showed a slightly lower average strength, it was still within the specification required for class 8-8
bolts. However, low carbon bainitic steel had a slightly better distribution of strength than that of
the conventional Q&T steel as can be seen from the standard deviation values for the steels in Fig. 4.
Also, the surface hardness values near the head end of the bolts are slightly higher in the low carbon
bainitic steels than in the Q&T steel, due to the large amount of cold working [6]. Similar results
were obtained by other researchers who worked on low carbon microalloyed steel for cold heading
applications [7, 8]. In a separate work [9] it was shown that low carbon bainitic microstructure also
offers good toughness values, the results of which are shown in Table 1. Fasteners of various
strength levels, from class 8-8 (tensile strength 800MPa) to class 12-9 (tensile strength
1200MPa), have been successfully developed using Nb microalloying additions [10].
Even though the low carbon microalloyed steel has good mechanical properties similar to that of the
conventional Q&T grade steels, it is important that they also possess at least the same, if not better,
fatigue properties. The typical Wohler curves (or the S-N curve) for the cold headed low carbon
microalloyed steel and the conventional quenched and tempered bolts are shown in Fig. 5. Clearly
the cold headed low carbon microalloyed steel had longer life for the same applied cyclic stress. It
was proposed that this excellent behaviour of the cold headed bolts was due to the cold work at the
root of the thread which retards the fatigue crack initiation. However, it is to be noted that
threading operation, after Q&T treatment, in the conventional steels can also produce good fatigue
results. However, the complications involved does not make it attractive for the additional cost
involved [4].

Fig. 4 Tensile properties of bolt produced using conventional quenched and tempered steels and low carbon niobium
microalloyed bainitic steel [5].

Table 1 Final properties of various high strength cold heading steels for Grade 8 (American standards) bolts [9]

Grade

YS
(MPa)

UTS
(MPa)

RA
(%)

Charpy Energy at
Room Temperature

4140 QT

931

967

62.3

19

5140 QT

907

1012

57.1

12

C-Mn-Mo-Nb

917

958

53.4

65

Fig. 5 Fatigue curves of class 8-8 hexagonal-head bolts having same strength levels showing the improvement for the
cold headed low carbon microalloyed steel.

The other important aspect of load bearing steels with strength levels above 1000 MPa is delayed
fracture, which could potentially be of serious problem for steels in bolt applications. Such high
strength steels invariably require high delayed fracture strength values. Delayed fracture strength
can be improved by Nb microalloying additions where the austenite grain refinement from Nb
improves the delayed fracture strength and the fine niobium carbonitride particles formed can
effectively trap hydrogen atoms thus reducing the tendency for delayed fracture [11].

Benefits of Low Carbon Microalloyed CHQ Steel

It was shown in the previous section that cold heading quality bolts can also be produced using low
carbon niobium microalloyed steel without any need for the intermediate softening (spheroidizing)
heat treatment and the final Q&T treatment for achieving the desired strength levels. The many
benefits of using the low carbon microalloyed steel for cold heading application are as given below.

Elimination of spheroidizing heat treatment that leads to significant savings on energy cost
and reduction in process cycle time. It is estimated that the direct energy savings from this
could be about 1000 KWh/metric ton of steel.

Since the low carbon microalloyed steel has very high cold formability, the entire
deformation can be applied in one step. On the other hand, the conventional Q&T steel may
require deformation to be given in steps with intermediate annealing, depending on the
chemistry used.

Elimination of post forming hardening heat treatment leading to further savings in the
energy costs and process cycle time. The estimated direct energy savings from this is about
3000 KWh/metric ton of steel.

The low carbon microalloyed steel does not make use of expensive alloying elements like Cr
and Mo, thus leading to significant savings in alloy costs.

The multi-phase microstructures (bainite + MA) are generally less prone for hydrogen
cracking and hence are less susceptible to delayed failure in plated components.

Freedom from surface decarburization that generally occurs in the conventional Q&T grade
bolts during heat treatment.

Conclusions
Low carbon niobium microalloyed cold heading steels form an attractive alternative to the
conventional medium carbon Q&T steels for fastener applications. The lower carbon and the
presence of niobium together result in bainitic microstructures with good ductility and strength after
work hardening leading to significant savings in energy and alloy costs apart from productivity of the
process by means of eliminating spheroidizing and Q&T heat treatments that are needed for
conventional cold heading Q&T steels. The presence of niobium also results in increased fatigue and
delayed fracture strengths.

Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank CBMM Technology Suisse S.A. and Ferro Tech India Pvt. Ltd. for
granting permission to publish this article. The author also invites interested parties to contact him
for further information or discussions on the published article.

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