Prediction of True Stress at Hot Deformation of High Manganese Steel by Artificial Neural Network Modeling

The development of new lightweight materials is required for the automotive industry to reduce the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on the environment. The lightweight, high-manganese steels are the prospective alloys for this purpose. Hot deformation is one of the stages of the production of steel. Hot deformation behavior is mainly determined by chemical composition and thermomechanical parameters. In the paper, an artificial neural network (ANN) model with high accuracy was constructed to describe the high Mn steel deformation behavior in dependence on the concentration of the alloying elements (C, Mn, Si, and Al), the deformation temperature, the strain rate, and the strain. The approval compression tests of the Fe–28Mn–8Al–1C were made at temperatures of 900–1150 °C and strain rates of 0.1–10 s−1 with an application of the Gleeble 3800 thermomechanical simulator. The ANN-based model showed high accuracy, and the low average relative error of calculation for both training (5.4%) and verification (7.5%) datasets supports the high accuracy of the built model. The hot deformation effective activation energy values for predicted (401 ± 5 kJ/mol) and experimental data (385 ± 22 kJ/mol) are in satisfactory accordance, which allows applying the model for the hot deformation analysis of the high-Mn steels with different concentrations of the main alloying elements.