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Prediction of Mechanical Properties of 50CrVA Tempered Steel Strip for Horn

Diaphragm Based on BPANN

Article  in  Journal of Wuhan University of Technology-Mater Sci Ed · October 2009

DOI: 10.1007/s11595-009-5791-0

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 Journal of Wuhan University of Technolotgy-Mater. Sci. Ed. Oct.2009 791

DOI 10.1007/s11595-009-5791-0

Prediction of Mechanical Properties of 50CrVA Tem-

pered Steel Strip for Horn Diaphragm Based on BPANN

JIANG Shuyong, ZHAO Lihong, WU Guixiang

(Engineering Training Center, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China)

Abstract: 50CrVA cold-rolled spring steel strip was used to fabricate the diaphragm of the
automotive horn. The material parameters which were taken into account in the design of the dia-
phragm involve elongation, elastic limit, Young’s modulus, yield strength and tensile strength. The
tempering process was carried out in order to enable the diaphragm to possess the excellent mechanical
properties, such as high elastic limit, high fatigue strength and perfect stress relaxation resistance. As a
nonlinear information processing system, the backpropagation artificial neural network (BPANN) was
applied to predict and simulate the relationship between the mechanical properties of the diaphragm
and the tempering process parameters. Experimental results show that a BPANN with 3-8-5 architec-
ture is capable of predicting the relationship between the mechanical properties of the diaphragm and
the tempering temperature successfully and lays the profound foundations for optimizing the design of
the diaphragm. BPANN simulation results show that the tempering temperature ranging from 380 to
420 ℃ contributes to enhancing the comprehensive mechanical properties of the diaphragm including
high Young’s modulus, high elastic limit and high fatigue strength.
Key words: artificial neural networks; mechanical properties; tempering; diaphragm; 50CrVA

1 Introduction Artificial neural networks (ANN) may be defined as

Automotive horn is a device for making an audible
tone for signaling persons in front of or near the vehicle,
or annunciating the occurrence of some event in the ve-
hicle. As the sound source of the automotive horn, the
diaphragm is a key component, which has a great influ-
ence on sound pressure level, frequency as well as en-
durance of the automotive horn. Service conditions of the
diaphragm frequently lead to the occurrence of the failure
modes of the diaphragm such as fatigue fracture and
stress relaxation. The appropriate design of the dia-
phragm is a critical task which refers mainly to the se-
lection of the material, the analysis of the mechanical
properties, the determination of heat treatment specifica-
tion as well as the plastic working of the diaphragm. Of
special importance are the mechanical properties of the
diaphragm material, which substantially affect the fatigue
life of the diaphragm. So far, no literatures have been
found to give the systematic design of the diaphragm of
the horn on the basis of theoretical or empirical data.
(Received: February 26, 2008; Accepted: July 7, 2009)
JIANG Shuyong (江江江): Ph D; Assoc. Prof.; Email: jiangshy@sina.com
Funded by the Research Foundation of Harbin Engineering University (No.
HEUFT06040)
structures consisting of densely interconnected adaptive
simple processing elements called artificial neurons or
nodes that are capable of performing massively parallel
computations for data processing and knowledge repre-
sentation[1]. The attractiveness of ANN comes from the
remarkable information processing characteristics perti-
nent mainly to nonlinearity, adaptability, high parallelism,
fault and failure tolerance, and learning and generaliza-
tion capabilities[2-4]. As a relatively new computational
tool, ANN has been efficient in solving many complex
problems, such as predicting flow stress[5, 6], predicting
fatigue properties, fatigue life and fracture toughness of
steels[7-9], simulating correlations between processing
parameters and properties in titanium alloys[10], modeling
the milling process[11], optimizing the rolling process[12],
predicting springback in sheet metal forming[13], estab-
lishing constitutive model of the metal material[14] and
optimizing the spinning process parameters[15].
The present work focused on the application of
ANN to predicting the mechanical properties of the dia-
phragm material under heat treatment specification in
order to optimize the process parameters for obtaining the
comprehensive mechanical properties of the diaphragm.
792 Vol.24 No.5 JIANG Shuyong et al: Prediction of Mechanical Propertie…

2 Experimental Table 1 Chemical composition of 50CrVA

Element Weight/%
The fabrication of the diaphragm refers to the initial Carbon 0.46-0.54
hybrid process of blanking and punching, the sheet metal Manganese 0.50-0.80
forming, and the final heat treatment process, as shown in Silicon 0.17-0.37
Fig.1. From the fabrication point of view, the processing Chromium 0.80-1.10
of the diaphragm is not a complex technique, but in terms Vanadium 0.10-0.20
of the application of the diaphragm, the mechanical Sulfur 0.030 max
properties are crucial for the diaphragm. The service Phosphorus 0.030 max
Nickel 0.35 max
condition of the diaphragm frequently leads to the stress
Iron Balance
relaxation and fracture failure of the diaphragm, as shown
in Fig.2, which demands that the diaphragm possess the
comprehensive mechanical properties, such as high fa- 3 Fundamentals of ANN
tigue strength, high Young’s modulus, high elastic limit
and etc. Therefore, how to control the heat treatment 3.1 Neuron model
parameters so as to optimize the mechanical properties of Artificial neuron, as shown in Fig.3 is an informa-
tion processing element that has many inputs but an
the diaphragm is a critical task in manufacturing the
output. If the neuron is the jth one, and the inputs which it
diaphragm.
receives from the other n neurons are x1, x2, …, xn, re-
spectively and the connection weights between the jth
neuron and the other n neurons are w1i, w2j, …, wnj, re-
spectively, then
n
(1)
y j = f (∑ wij xi - θ j )
Where θ j is the threshold
i=1 of the neuron, y j is the
Fig.1 Schematic diagram of the fabrication of the diaphragm(a) output of the neuron, and f is the transfer function,
the hybrid process of blanking and punching (b) sheet which is the basic Sigmoid and possesses the distinctive
metal forming (c) heat treatment properties of nonlinearity, continuity and differentiability
on (-∞, +∞). The sigmoid function is expressed as:
1 (2)
f ( x) =
1 + exp(− x)

Fig.2 Fracture failure of the diaphragm

The metal material used to fabricate the diaphragm
is spring steel strip 50CrVA which was manufactured by
means of cold rolling. The nominal chemical composi-
tion of the spring steel 50CrVA is shown in Table 1.
According to the characteristics of the cold-rolled steel
strip, tempering is an effective approach to enhance the
mechanical properties of the diaphragm. The tensile tests
were carried out so as to obtain the mechanical property
parameters of the diaphragm under various tempering
specification. Simultaneously, the experimental data are
also imparted to the ANN as training example data in
order to establish the relationship between the mechani-
cal properties of the diaphragm and the tempering pa-
rameters, namely tempering temperature, tempering ve-
locity and tempering time.
Fig.3 Schematic diagram of neuron model
3.2 Network structure
Network structure is a three-layer feedforward
network consisting of an input layer, a hidden layer and
an output layer. In the network, the data are fed forward
into the network without feedback, i e, all links between
neurons are unidirectional and there are no neu-
ron-to-neuron connections in the same layer. Unlike the
neurons of the input layer, the neurons of the hidden layer
and output layer possess computational property.
3.3 BP algorithm
The training of the network is based on the error
backpropagation learning algorithm which searches an
error surface using gradient descent for point with
minimum error. The algorithm of training a BP network
is summarized as follows:
 Journal of Wuhan University of Technolotgy-Mater. Sci. Ed. Oct.2009
1) Initialize weights and thresholds, namely assign
arbitrary small random values for the weights and
thresholds.
2) Present training data, i e, present the input vectors
and the desired outputs.
3) Calculate the actual output y j of the network.
y j = f (∑ wij xi − θ j )
i 4.1 Input layer neuron size
where f is the sigmoid function.
4) Calculate the error E of the network
1 2
E =
2
∑(y j
j
− y j* )
where the jth neuron is in the output layer, y j is
the actual output and y ∗j is the target output. Assume ε
is the allowable error accuracy, and if E < ε , then save
initial weights and thresholds, and finish training, oth-
erwise carry out the next step.
5) Calculate all nodes error of the output layer and
hidden layer.
If the jth neuron is in the output layer, δ j is cal-
culated from
δj=yj(1－yj)(yj－y*j) (5)
If the jth neuron is in the hidden layer, δ j is de-
termined from
δ j = y j(1 − y j )∑ δk w jk
(6)
k possess the excellent mechanical properties, such as high
where δ j is the error of the jth neuron.
6) Adjust the weights and thresholds according to
the error back-propagation direction.
( t +1)
+ ηδ j yi
(t )
wij = wij
θj ( t +1) =θj ( t ) +ηδj
If a momentum coefficient is used, then
wij t +1 = wij t + ηδ j yi + α ( wij t -wij t -1 )
t +1 t t
θj = θ j + ηδ j + α[θ j -θ j ]
where η is the Learning rate, 0 < η < 1 ，and α is
the momentum coefficient， 0 < α < 1 .
Eq.(7) returns to Eq.(2) to compute repeatedly until
the error agrees with the prespecified tolerance.
3.4 Normalization of data
Normalization of data within a uniform range is
essential to preventing larger numbers from overriding
smaller ones and to preventing premature saturation of
hidden nodes, which impedes the learning process. Input
and output variables are normalized in interval (0, 1)
corresponding to the range of the transfer function.
However, in order to avoid saturation of the sigmoid
function leading to slow or no learning between 0 and 0.1
as well as between 0.9 and 1, it is recommended that the
data be normalized between 0.1 and 0.9. The normaliza-
tion formula is as follows:
Z -Z min
Z n = 0.8 ٛ
Z max -Z min
793
where Z n is the normalized value of Z , and Z max
and Z min are the maximum and minimum values of
Z in the database, respectively.
4 Determination of ANN Pa-
rameters
(3)
The number of nodes in the input layer is determined
according to the problem to be solved. As the 50CrVA
steel strip used as the diaphragm material is cold rolled,
(4) the tempering heat treatment is a necessary approach to
enhance the mechanical properties of the diaphragm. The
application of the BPANN is aimed at establishing the
relationship between the tempering parameters and the
mechanical properties of the diaphragm. The input vari-
ables of the network are the tempering parameters in-
cluding tempering temperature, tempering time and
tempering medium (cooling velocity). As a result, the
number of nodes in the input layer can be 3.
4.2 Output layer neuron size
As a key elastic component and vibrating sound
source, the diaphragm of the automotive horn operates in
an alternating stress state. Furthermore, the failure modes
of the diaphragm involve fatigue fracture and stress re-
laxation. Therefore, the metal materials used to fabricate
the diaphragm of the automotive horn are expected to
elastic limit, high fatigue strength and perfect stress re-
laxation resistance. The material parameters which are
taken into account in the design of the diaphragm in-
(7) volves Young’s modulus, elastic limit, yield strength,
tensile strength and elongation. The output variables of
(8)
the network consist of Young’s modulus, elastic limit,
yield strength, tensile strength and Elongation. Therefore,
the output layer size of the network is 5.
(9)
4.3 Hidden layer neuron size
t -1
(10) A network with too few hidden nodes is incapable of
differentiating between complex patterns leading to only
a linear estimate of the actual trend. In contrast, if the
network has too many hidden nodes, it will follow the
noise in the data due to overparameterization leading to
poor generalization for untrained data. On the other hand,
with increasing number of hidden nodes, training be-
comes excessively time-consuming. It is shown generally
that when the number of nodes in the hidden layer is as
two times or so as the number of nodes in the input layer,
the network can be more compatible in terms of the ca-
pacity and training time. According to the rule, the
number of nodes in the hidden layer is 8.
4.4 Learning rate and momentum coeffi-
cient
A high learning rate will accelerate training by
changing the weight vector. However, this may cause the
(11) search for point with minimum error to oscillate on the
error surface and never converge, thus increasing the risk
794 Vol.24 No.5 JIANG Shuyong et al: Prediction of Mechanical Propertie…
of overshooting a near-optimal weight. In contrast, a
small learning rate drives the search steadily in the di-
rection of the global minimum, though slowly. To
achieve an optimal weigh vector, it is necessary to use an
adaptive learning rate η (t ) , which varies along the course
of training.
If Et +1 < Et , then η (t + 1) = (1 + β )η (t ) (12)
If Et +1 ≥ Et , then η (t + 1) = (1 − β )η (t ) (13)
Where E is the error, β is a small positive
number, generally β ＝0.01-0.03.
A momentum coefficient is commonly used in
weight updating to help the search escape local minima
and reduce the likelihood of search instability. A high
momentum coefficient will reduce the risks of the net-
work being stuck in local minima, but it increases the risk
of overshooting the solution as does a high learning rate.
Conversely, an extremely small momentum coefficient
leads to slow training. It is suggested that momentum
coefficient be between 0 and 1.
5 Results and Discussion
According to the determination of the network pa-
rameters, the structure of the network is 3-8-5 as shown
in Fig.4. X 1 , X 2 and X 3 represent tempering temperature,
tempering time and cooling velocity, respectively.
Y1 , Y2 , Y3 , Y4 and Y5 represent Young’s modulus, elastic
limit, yield strength, tensile strength and elongation,
respectively.
Fig.4 Prediction model of BPANN
In order to guarantee the prediction accuracy, data to
be used for training the network should be large enough
to cover the possible known variation in the problem
domain. The 60 sample data belonging to the required
problem domain from the experiments are used to train
the network. The convergence of the network is shown in
Fig.5. It is seen from Fig.5 that the convergence of the
network gradually achieves to a stable state through 7
thousand times iterations. The other 20 sample data are
used to test the trained network. The network through
training and testing is used to further simulate and predict
the relationship between the mechanical properties of the
diaphragm and the tempering temperature where the test
specimens are cooled in the air and tempering time is 1 h,
as shown in Fig.6.
Fig.5 Variations of error function value versus number of iterations
Figs.6 (a) and (b) shows that both Young’s modulus
and elastic limit increase with the increase of the tem-
pering temperature at the beginning, but after 400 ℃ or
so, the two decrease with the increase of the tempering
temperature. The above phenomenon reveals that the
metal material exhibits the highest elastic limit and
Young’s modulus at the tempering temperature of about
400 ℃.It is obviously seen from Figs.6 (c) and (d) that
yield strength and tensile strength show the same varying
trend with respect to the tempering temperature. Yield
strength along with tensile strength increases with in-
creasing the tempering temperature prior to 400 ℃ or so
and decreases with increasing the tempering temperature
after 400 ℃ or so, but after 450 ℃ or so, yield strength as
well as tensile strength decreases sharply and is even
lower than the counterparts of the original cold-rolled
metal material. Seen from Fig.6 (e), the plasticity of the
metal material is always increasing with the increase of
the tempering temperature, but increases not predomi-
nantly prior to 450 ℃ or so as well as sharply after 450 ℃
or so. It is well known that the decrease of strength as
well as the enhancement of plasticity of the metal mate-
rial at the tempering temperature higher than 450 ℃
should result from the occurrence of the recovery in the
process of tempering.
According to the BPANN simulation results men-
tioned above, the tempering temperature ranging from
380 ℃ to 420 ℃ contributes to enhancing the compre-
hensive mechanical properties of the diaphragm, such as
high Young’s modulus, high elastic limit, high yield
strength and tensile strength.
The horn diaphragms made of 50CrVA cold-rolled
steel strip was tempered at the temperature range from
380 ℃ to 420 ℃ for 1 h, and then was imparted to a
fatigue life test in which the diaphragm was operated
under alternating stress of 500 Hz frequency. The test
results show that the horn diaphragms have no occur-
rence of fatigue fracture through fatigue life test of two
hundred thousand cycles where one cycle is defined as
horn operating for one second and resting for four sec-
onds. The experimental results demonstrate that the
tempering temperature ranging from 380 ℃ to 420 ℃
does make the diaphragm of the horn show high fatigue
strength.
 Journal of Wuhan University of Technolotgy-Mater. Sci. Ed. Oct.2009
Fig.6 Prediction of the mechanical properties of the diaphragm using BPANN
6 Conclusions
a) A BPANN with 3-8-5 structure is capable of
predicting the relationship between the mechanical
properties of the diaphragm material and the tempering
temperature successfully and lays the profound founda-
tions for optimizing the design of the diaphragm.
b) Tempering has a significant influence on the
mechanical properties of the diaphragm. BPANN simu-
lation results show that the tempering temperature rang-
ing from 380 to 420 ℃ contributes to enhancing the
comprehensive mechanical properties of the diaphragm
including high Young’s modulus, high elastic limit and
high fatigue strength.
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