Losses and permeability improvement by stress relieving fully processed electrical steels with previous small deformations

The strong increase in the 1.5 T total losses of a 2.2% Si electrical steel, when a small plastic deformation is applied, is almost exclusively due to the increase in its quasi-static hysteresis loss. Stress relieving at 700°C promoted no change in the grain size, a significant reduction of 1.5 T total losses and increased permeability, which did not reach, however, the non-deformed values. The anisotropy of total losses of the annealed samples is concentrated in the high-induction component of the hysteresis loss.