Constitutive behavior and microstructural evolution in hot deformed 2297 Al-Li alloy

The microstructural evolution mechanism and constitutive behavior of 2297 Al-Li alloy were studied via thermal compression test with the constant strain rates of 0.001–1 s⁻¹ and the deformation temperatures ranging from 623 to 773 K. To verify the predictable ability of diverse constitutive models under different stress states, the hot compression experiments with stress triaxiality varying from −0.33 to 0.46 were conducted. The microstructures of the deformed specimens under diverse deformation conditions are probed to reveal the mechanism of hot deformation behavior. The experimental results indicate that the work-hardening and dynamic softening are competitive during the hot compression process, and the dynamic softening is more obvious under low deformation temperature and high strain rate. The microstructural analysis manifests that the dynamic recovery gets predominant at high deformation temperature to produce fine grains. Meanwhile, the dynamic recrystallization becomes more dominant as the strain rate decreases, which is sensitive to the stress triaxiality. In addition, both the modified Johnson-Cook model and strain-compensated Arrhenius-type function are suitable for describing the flow behavior of 2297 alloy, while the latter reveals a more accurate prediction. However, the predictability of the two kinds of models is worsened with the transformation of stress triaxiality, and the validity of the Arrhenius-type model is restricted by high stress triaxiality.