Prediction of flow stress in dynamic strain aging regime of austenitic stainless steel 316 using artificial neural network

Flow stress during hot deformation depends mainly on the strain, strain rate and temperature, and shows a complex nonlinear relationship with them. A number of semi empirical models were reported by others to predict the flow stress during deformation. In this work, an artificial neural network is used for the estimation of flow stress of austenitic stainless steel 316 particularly in dynamic strain aging regime that occurs at certain strain rates and certain temperatures and varies flow stress behavior of metal being deformed. Based on the input variables strain, strain rate and temperature, this work attempts to develop a back propagation neural network model to predict the flow stress as output. In the first stage, the appearance and terminal of dynamic strain aging are determined with the aid of tensile testing at various temperatures and strain rates and subsequently for the serrated flow domain an artificial neural network is constructed. The whole experimental data is randomly divided in two parts: 90% data as training data and 10% data as testing data. The artificial neural network is successfully trained based on the training data and employed to predict the flow stress values for the testing data, which were compared with the experimental values. It was found that the maximum percentage error between predicted and experimental data is less than 8.67% and the correlation coefficient between them is 0.9955, which shows that predicted flow stress by artificial neural network is in good agreement with experimental results. The comparison between the two sets of results indicates the reliability of the predictions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.