Removing the Effects of Cold Working

Typically annealing is used after cold working. In reality, too much information is lacking from your question.

What type of metal?

To be used for what purpose?

What additional processes are required to complete the work piece?

As for asking which (annealing or tempering) is better; I'll answer that, if you will tell me which you choose to be better, your ankle, or your knee?

As correctly pointed out by # 1 unless you are specific about the metal by specification it will be impossible to clarify. For instance if the the material happen to be 20XX Al, Cu Aluminum alloy or 4XX Martensitic grades of stainless steel it is advisable to anneal and recover the desired hardness after forming by further heat treatment. For non heat treatable Al alloys like 10XX or 3XX austenitic stainless steel Annealing may not be advisable. You may have to resort to stress relieving repeatedly if necessary.

Hi Phillip, In order to remove the effects of cold working, a heat treatment procedure is required. It consists in heating metals/ alloys to a certain temperature, holding & cooling them at variour rates with the aim of altering their structure & properties. The rate of heating depends on chemical composition, shape & size of the work.

Annealing is used to decrease hardness, to relieve internal stresses, to correct structure, to eliminate strain hardening, to improve machinability

Tempering is employed to lessen or eliminate entirely internal stresses, to soften the hardened steel & to increase its ductility.

Therefore opt for STRESS- Relief Annealing. The annealing temp. is in the range of 200 to 700 Deg.C & more frequently from 350 to 600 Deg.C for steel parts. The holding time is usually several hours & is established by experiment.

Go to nearby Heat treatment shop & get it done. Good luck. Rangasamy

Thanks Rangasamy now I have a better idea of what am dealing with now

The effects of cold working may be reversed by annealing the material at high temperatures where recovery and recrystallization reduce the dislocation density.

To release the stored energy and restore the metal to an energy level closer to its original state, the cold worked metal can be heated, either continuously from a lower to a higher temperature, or isothermally, i.e., at a constant temperature. Energy will be released in three identifiable stages: recovery, recrystallization, and grain growth.

When a cold worked metal is heated, there are some rather gradual property changes that occur without appreciable microstructural alterations and other property changes that are more pronounced and accompany marked alterations in the microstructure.

More information could have helped...

All the best...