On the stability of cold drawn, two-phase wires

Two-phase materials can be deformed by wire drawing to produce materials with tensile strength levels of the order of E/100. In this condition, they possess ultrafine scale microstructures. This paper examines various aspects of the stability of such structures including the mechanical stability of elastically stressed second phases, the tendency to instability by spheroidization, and the occurrence of discontinuous coarsening due to large local gradients of stored energy in drawn two-phase structures.