Prediction of Flow Stress of Annealed 7075 Al Alloy in Hot Deformation Using Strain-Compensated Arrhenius and Neural Network Models

Hot compression experiments of annealed 7075 Al alloy were performed on TA DIL805D at different temperatures (733, 693, 653, 613 and 573 K) with different strain rates (1.0, 0.1, 0.01 and 0.001 s(−1).) Based on experimental data, the strain-compensated Arrhenius model (SCAM) and the back-propagation artificial neural network model (BP-ANN) were constructed for the prediction of the flow stress. The predictive power of the two models was estimated by residual analysis, correlation coefficient (R) and average absolute relative error (AARE). The results reveal that the deformation parameters including strain, strain rate, and temperature have a significant effect on the flow stress of the alloy. Compared with the SCAM model, the flow stress predicted by the BP-ANN model is in better agreement with experimental values. For the BP-ANN model, the maximum residual is only 1 MPa, while it is as high as 8 MPa for the SCAM model. The R and AARE for the SCAM model are 0.9967 and 3.26%, while their values for the BP-ANN model are 0.99998 and 0.18%, respectively. All these reflect that the BP-ANN model has more accurate prediction ability than the SCAM model, which can be applied to predict the flow stress of the alloy under high temperature deformation.