Abstract
In recent years, there has been a considerable interest in the application of super plastic forming in the aircraft and automotive industries. This requires a detailed design of the technological process in order to exploit its peculiar potentialities better. Nowadays, the finite element method is used to plan the sheet metal forming processes whose simulation requires determination of material constants for super plastic materials. The present work is aimed to show a simple method to characterize super plastic materials duplex stainless steel which was formed by a constant gaspressure to hemispheres with and without back pressure. The forming operation was performed using an in-house designed and built biaxial forming apparatus. The temporal change of dome heights of hemispheres were measured for applying the pressures. The flow stresses and strain rates developed at the top of the dome during the forming step were shown to follow closely the flow stress - strain rate relationship obtained from the strain rate change tests performed at the same temperature.
