High-temperature forming behaviors of a 7046-aluminum alloy were investigated by hot compression experiments. The microstructural evolution features with the changes in deformation parameters were dissected. Results indicated the formation of massive dislocation clusters/cells and subgrains through the intense DRV mechanism at low compression temperature. With an increase in deformation temperature, the annihilation of dislocations and the coarsening of subgrains/DRX grains became prominent, due to the collaborative effects of the DRV and DRX mechanisms. However, the growth of subgrains and DRX grains displayed the weakening trend at high strain rates. Moreover, two constitutive models involving a physically based (PB) model and a gate recurrent unit (GRU) model were proposed for predicting the hot compression features. By validation analysis, the predicted values of true stress perfectly fit with the experimental data, indicating that both the proposed PB model and the GRU model can accurately predict the hot compression behaviors of 7046-aluminum alloys.
Keywords: 7046-aluminum alloys; constitutive models; high-temperature compression behaviors; microstructure evolution.