Artificial neural network (ANN) gets a lot of applications in predicting flow stress of steels at high temperature. However, few studies have been devoted to simultaneously predict flow stress of several steels by ANN. The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of ANN on simultaneously predicting flow stress of several steels. Based on the results of previous compression experiments of four types of microalloyed forging steel, using the mass percentage of major chemical composition of the steels, such as as C, Mn, Si and V, and deformation temperature, strain rate and strain as input variables, a three-layers back propagation neural network was established as the constitutive model for them. Standard statistical methods were employed to quantitatively measure the accuracy of predicted results by the model. The calculated correlation coefficient and the average relative error absolute value between the predicted values by the model and experimental values were 0.9982 and 2.4181%, respectively. In addition, the relative error between the two kinds of values was calculated, and for more than 89% samples, the relative error was within ± 5%. The results show that the developed constitutive model can predict the flow stress of the four types of microalloyed forging steel accurately and simultaneously.
