The effect of plastic anisotropy of the BCC lattice on residual stress
es was analyzed for the case of severely cold-drawn steel wire. Accord
ing to the analysis, lateral stresses develop inside individual crysta
llites of ferrite resulting from the plastic anisotropy, the compatibi
lity requirements at the crystallite boundaries, and the strong [110]
axial texture. It was shown that in a crystallite with the [110] axis
parallel to the drawing direction, the tensile stress appears along th
e [001] axis and the compressive stress along the [1(1) over bar0$] ax
is. Only these stresses, referred to as mesostresses, cause non-linear
ity of the interplanar spacing dependencies on sin(2) psi, where psi i
s the angle between reflecting planes and the wire specimen surface. S
uch non-linearity, observed in the case of cold-drawn steel wire, does
not allow one to estimate residual stresses by means of the usual X-r
ay ''sin(2) psi technique''. The model suggested in this work enables
one to estimate the macrostresses acting on the scale of the wire as w
ell as the mesostresses acting on the scale of the individual crystall
ites. For the cold-drawn 0.7% C steel wire the mesostress level is abo
ut 300 MPa. The approach used in this work can be applied to the resid
ual stress analysis of other materials and methods of cold-metal worki
ng.