Dynamic deformation behavior and constitutive model of a Zr–W alloy

In this paper, a Zr–5W alloy was fabricated via casting. In order to obtain the mechanical properties of the material, quasi-static compression tests at room temperature and split Hopkinson pressure bar tests at various temperatures were carried out. The x-ray diffraction result showed that the main components of the alloy were αZr and W2Zr, where αZr is the matrix and W2Zr is the reinforcement. The metallographic characterization results showed that there were two main forms of W2Zr in the material, namely, large particle boundary and small diffuse submicrometer precipitates. The reinforcements of both distributions have the effect of increasing the strength of the material, but the small submicrometer W2Zr precipitates would cause microcrack nucleation during the late plastic deformation stage, resulting in damage softening. In order to make theoretical calculations of the mechanical properties of materials, the Johnson–Cook (JC) constitutive model and Zerilli–Armstrong (ZAM) constitutive model of the material were obtained. It was found that the JC constitutive model had poor consistency in describing material properties. Although the consistency of the ZAM constitutive model was higher than that of the JC constitutive model, it still had obvious shortcomings. Combined with the deformation mechanism of the alloy, a modified constitutive relation was established by adding damage softening terms based on the hexagonal close-packed metal constitutive model inferred by the kinetics of heat-activated dislocations. The relative error results of all working conditions show that the correlation consistency of the improved constitutive model in this paper is significantly better than that of JC constitutive and ZAM constitutive.