| Accurate material behavior prediction during large deformations is essential. For the U.S. Army, explosively formed projectiles (EFP), penetrators, and vehicle armor are applications which will benefit from a better understanding of and ability to predict material behavior when subjected to high and varying strain rates and temperatures. Linking macro-scale material behavior with the evolution of microstructure has proven effective in obtaining an appropriate mathematical structure for constitutive relationships. Incorporation of strain rate, temperature, and deformation path history effects are especially critical to accurately predict material responses for arbitrary nonisothermal, variable strain rate conditions. Material constitutive equations contain numerous parameters which must be determined experimentally, and often are not fully optimized.; The goal of this research was to develop more physically descriptive kinematics and kinetics models for large strain deformation based on internal state variable (ISV) evolution laws which include strain rate and temperature history dependence. A unique and comprehensive set of experiments involving sequences of different strain rates, temperatures, and deformation paths, as well as, constant strain rate, isothermal and experiments characterizing restoration processes, were conducted on OFHC Cu. Microstructural examinations found that recrystallization occurs and has a significant influence on the flow stress. The performance of various models, including state-of-the-art models such as the BCJ (Sandia), MTS (Los Alamos), and McDowell models were correlated and compared to experimental data. A novel hybrid optimization strategy was used to obtain the optimum parameter set possible corresponding to each model form. To account for the observed flow stress softening, an internal state variable representing the "softened" recrystallized state was incorporated into the hardening evolution equations in the BCJ and McDowell models. The temperature dependent behavior at very high strain rates (10{dollar}sp6{dollar} s{dollar}sp{lcub}-1{rcub}{dollar}) was investigated. A term, representing this high strain rate regime, added to the evolution equations was found to greatly improve the correlations to data. |
