Determination of the temperature at which Austenite is formed is one of the important
parameters in the heat treatment process. Chemical composition is an effective factor on these
temperatures, particularly in steels that are used in various industries. In this research we have made
an attempt to determine these temperatures based on the chemical composition of the steel. The
technique used for this purpose is feedforward Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with the Back
Propagation (BP) learning algorithm. A comparison is made between Ac1, Ac3 temperatures
predicted with this model and those from the empirical equation as well as the experimental values
obtained from costly and time-consuming tests in scientific and industrial centers for various steels.
This comparison indicates that at Ac1, a better agreement exists between the ANN-predicted results
and experimental values than the results from the empirical equation and experimental values. At
Ac3, the results from the empirical equation are closer to those of the experimental than those
predicted from the ANN. This was due to the dispersion of the data set used.