Abstract:The SCR continuous casting and rolling process is a crucial industrial method for producing electrical copper rods. The differences in the microstructure and mechanical properties of copper rods produced by different production lines result in varying down?stream product types. To investigate the differences in the microstructure and mechanical properties of copper rods from different SCR continuous casting and rolling production lines and to study the underlying mechanisms causing these differences, this work analyzed the mechanical properties of copper rods from two different SCR continuous casting and rolling production lines, SCR1 and SCR2, of a certain enterprise, using room temperature uniaxial tensile and hardness tests. The microstructure of copper rods was characterized using optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and electron back scatter diffraction (EBSD). Quantitative studies on the differences and intrinsic relationships between the microstructure and mechanical properties of two copper rods were conducted. The results showed that the tensile strength and elongation of SCR1 and SCR2 copper rods were similar (approximately 230 MPa and 42%), while the latter possessed slightly larger grain size and a 38% higher yield strength of 147 MPa. The copper rods from both production lines exhibited similar grain sizes without an order of magnitude difference, comparable high angle grain boundary ratios, and weak textures, resulting in similar tensile strength and elongation to failure. Both SCR1 and SCR2 copper rods still retained incompletely annealed dislocations, with the latter possessing a higher dislocation density, which contributed to the higher yield strength of the latter.