Predicting the medium-temperature thermal stability of impact-strengthened medium-thick plate aluminum alloy using a back propagation artificial neural network

A normalized medium-thick plate of aluminum alloy (4038) was impact-strengthened using a free-fall method at room temperature (approximately 20 degrees C). Specimens were then aged at 450 degrees C, 550 degrees C and 650 degrees C for 10, 20, 30 and 40 min respectively. Micro-hardness of each sample was tested. Micro-structure of samples annealed at 650 degrees C for different durations was characterized. A three-layer back propagation artificial neural network (BPANN) was trained using actual state parameters of the prepared samples. Results reveal that medium-temperature thermal stability of the prepared plate can be predicted through the BPANN model. Deviation of predicted values from the experimental ones is within 6 %, with a prediction accuracy exceeding 94 %. Variation trend of the predicted and the experimental thermal stability is consistent, but the predicted values are all higher than the measurements. Prediction accuracy of BPANN can be improved by increasing convergence rate of the error function. By adding relevant parameters of the micro-structure from samples aged at 650 degrees C to the input layer, BPANN model further improve its output and approach the real state of samples. The findings of this study can help researchers reduce the number and cost of experiments. The aim of this work was to predict the medium-temperature thermal stability of impact-strengthened normalized medium-thick plate of aluminum alloy annealed at different temperatures, and it also can be used as reference for other similar experiments.