Comparative Study of Flow Stress Modeling of Zircaloy-4 Sheets Manufactured from Different Routes

Zircaloy-4 is proven to be an excellent structural material in the nuclear industry. In the present work, three types of zircaloy-4 sheet materials are subjected to tensile tests at strain rates of 0.001s^-1, 0.005s^-1, 0.01s^-1, and at four different temperatures of 298K(room temperature), 348K, 423K, and 498K. The tensile stress-strain data has been used to model the flow stress using three different constitutive models, namely the Johnson-Cook (JC) model, modified Zerilli-Armstrong (m-ZA), and modified Arrhenius (m-Arr) model. The models' prediction capability for all the materials is compared using the Coefficient of correlation (R), average absolute error (Δ), and the number of constants to be determined. It has resulted that the m-Arr model has high goodness of fit with a maximum R-value is 0.9950, and the minimum Δ is 1.1132% for Low Oxygen Sheet (LOS) material. It is also a suitable model for the other two zircaloy-4 materials, even though more constants are to be evaluated.