Abstract
Fiber forming is an important technology for producing multi-functional goods that have a flexible and structured plane form by using raw material with special properties. This research reports on the metal fiber manufacturing technology that adopted induction heating and drawing, but without use of dies that are now installed in the conventional wire drawing processes. Heating wires allows the drawing process to build up necking and to shorten the process by reducing the process steps so that a new and efficient production method of metal fibers is to be conceived and developed. A new device that can process a single wire consists of three major parts: the drawing part comprised of capstans, that is, feeding roll and take-up roll with specially hardened circumferential surface, the change gear part with continuously controllable draw ratio, and the heating part that includes a heating source and an energy propagation channel and an electromagnetic wave absorber With this device feasibility of the induction heating method is tested and the characteristics of the metal wire drawing process is analyzed. Results show that the microwave can be applied to attenuate the metal wire as a heating source and the experimental profiles of the cross-sectional area in the heated drawing zone under a steady state condition coincide well with those from theoretical model. The diametric variation of the drawn wires increased, however, as the drawing ratio increased.
