Angular magnetic Barkhausen noise of incline- and cross-rolled non-oriented electrical steel sheets

Highlights: • Magnetocrystalline anisotropy energy (MAE) of electrical steel was characterized by EBSD and magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN). • The MBN energy corresponding to the saturation-to-remanence part of the hysteresis loop was evaluated and compared to MAE. • The results do not support the reported correlation between the angular MBN and the MAE in the literature. • The residual stress and the difference in sampling locations may have caused the discrepancy in the results. Magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN) analysis is a relatively new technique used to characterize the magnetic properties of electrical steels. Not only has it been utilized to evaluate the overall core loss of electrical steel sheets, but it has also been employed as a non-destructive testing (NDT) tool to assess the magnetocrystalline anisotropy of ferromagnetic materials. In this study, non-oriented electrical steel sheets produced by inclined and cross rolling were characterized by both MBN and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD). The angular MBN measured on the surface of the steel sheet was directly compared to the magnetocrystalline anisotropy energy (MAE) calculated from the measured crystallographic texture. The MBN energy corresponding to the saturation-to-remanence part of the hysteresis loop was evaluated, which had been reported to have a close correlation to the MAE in pipeline steels. The results in this study showed that such a relationship did not exist in any of the electrical steel samples examined (including deformed, partially recrystallized, and completely recrystallized), although in some samples the polarities of the MBN and MAE partially coincide. It was shown that the residual stress in the material played an important role in determining the polarities of the angular MBN, which had been ignored in the previous studies when comparing the MBN to the MAE. Possible reasons that caused the discrepancies between the results of this study and those of the previous studies were given.