Constitutive modeling of powder metallurgy processed Al–4%Cu preforms during compression at elevated temperature

•The hot deformation behaviour of P/M processed Al–4%Cu preforms was investigated.•The constitutive model to predict the flow stress at elevated temperature was formulated.•The proposed constitutive model correlate well with the experimental results.

In this study, a hot deformation constitutive base analysis has been conducted on powder metallurgy (P/M) processed Al–4%Cu preforms. The main objective is to evaluate the effect of initial relative density on the hot deformation behaviour and to establish the constitutive equation which considers the effect of initial relative density during hot compression test. This has been carried out by using the true stress–true strain curve data obtained from hot compression test of P/M processed Al–4%Cu preforms with different initial relative density of 0.84, 0.87 and 0.9 for various range of temperature 300–500 °C and strain rate range of 0.1–0.4 s−1. It has been found that the flow stress is notably influenced by initial relative density, temperature and strain rate. The results show that the flow stress exhibits peak value at certain strain value, and then decreases showing flow softening until the flow stress remains constant at higher strain values. A constitutive equation that predicts the flow stress in hot compression of P/M processed Al–4%Cu preforms has been developed. The predicted flow stress values are in a good agreement with the experimental results and it is confirmed that the formulated constitutive equation is accurate and reliable to predict the flow stress of Al–4%Cu preforms during hot compression at elevated temperature.