A critical review of experimental results and constitutive descriptions for metals and alloys in hot working

In industrial forming processes, the metals and alloys are subject to complex strain, strain-rate, and temperature histories. Understanding the flow behaviors of metals and alloys in hot working has a great importance for designers of metal forming processes. In order to study the workability and establish the optimum hot formation processing parameters for some metals and alloys, a number of research groups have made efforts to carry out the thermo-mechanical experiments (compressive, tensile and torsion tests) over wide forming temperatures and strain-rates, and some constitutive equations were developed to describe the hot deformation behaviors. This paper presents a critical review on some experimental results and constitutive descriptions for metals and alloys in hot working, which were reported in international publications in recent years. In this review paper, the constitutive models are divided into three categories, including the phenomenological, physical-based and artificial neural network models, to introduce their developments, prediction capabilities, and application scopes, respectively. Additionally, some limitations and objective suggestions for the further development of constitutive descriptions for metals and alloys in hot working are proposed. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.