Abstract

Tyre industry wishes always wires with best mechanical performances. This continuous improvement of the performances needs the knowledge and the understanding of the deformation process of the wire. To reach this goal, it is useful to know the cristallographic texture and its evolution during the drawing process.The depth of penetration of X Ray not being very important (about some tens of micrometers or more in metal, depending on he absorption [1]), the X Ray examination can be considered as a superficial one for large wires (about a millimeter diameter or more).On the other hand, if we consider thin wires, it can be said that X-ray can penetrate deeply and even reach the core of the wire. In this case the information we get from the diffracted intensities is a mean orientation factor K(ϕ,ψ) [2] subject to modification caused by the absorption and the diffracting volume effect. This mean factor will be closer than that of the surface, especially when the wire becomes larger or the texture gradient gets lower.To measure with accuracy the texture of steelcord and its change, we have developed a X-ray diffraction procedure to obtain the texture evolution across the wire radius for each important step of the drawing process [2,3]. This evolution is studied according to some drawing parameters.