MODELING THE CORRELATION BETWEEN HEAT TREATMENT, CHEMICAL COMPOSITION AND BAINITE FRACTION OF PIPELINE STEELS BY MEANS OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

In the present study, bainite fraction results of continuous cooling of high strength low alloy steels have been modeled by artificial neural networks. The artificial neural network models were constructed by 16 input parameters including chemical compositions (C, Mn, Nb, Mo, Ti, N, Cu, P, S, Si, Al, V), Nb in solution, austenitizing temperature, initial austenite grain size and cooling rate over the temperature range of the occurrence of phase transformations. The value for the output layer was the bainite fraction. According to the input parameters in feed-forward back-propagation algorithm, the constructed networks were trained, validated and tested. To make a decision on the completion of the training processes, two termination states are declared: state 1 (ANN-I model) means that the training of neural network was ended when the maximum epoch of process reached (1000) while state 2 (ANN-II model) means the training ended when minimum error norm of network gained. The entire statistical evaluators of ANN-II model has higher performance than those of ANN-I. However, both of the models exhibit valuable results and the entire statistical values show that the proposed ANN-I and ANN-II models are suitably trained and can predict the bainite fraction values very close to the experimental ones.