Effect of oxygen content and microstructure on the thermo-mechanical response of three Ti–6Al–4V alloys: Experiments and modeling over a wide range of strain-rates and temperatures

Results from a series of experiments on three different titanium alloys, under quasi-static and dynamic loading conditions are presented. The Ti–6Al–4V titanium alloys include the ELI version and two with higher oxygen contents. The strain-rates are varied from 10⁻⁶ to 3378 s⁻¹ while observations are made at temperatures from 233 to 755 K. The alloys initial and deformed photomicrographs and various deformation mechanisms responsible for the induced plastic deformation, are presented and discussed. Differences in the responses of these alloys are observed in terms of thermal softening, work hardening, and strain-rate and temperature sensitivities. The Khan–Huang–Liang (KHL) model is used to effectively simulate the observed responses obtained from these experiments. The model, with the constants determined from these experiments, is then used to predict strain-rate jump experimental results, and also high temperature dynamic experiments for one of the alloys; the predictions are found to be very close to the observations.