The effects of strain rate, temperature, and tungsten alloying on the yield stress and the strain-hardening behavior of tantalum were investigated. The yield and flow stresses of unalloyed Ta and tantalum-tungsten alloys were found to exhibit very high rate sensitivities, while the hardening rates in Ta and Ta-W alloys were found to be insensitive to strain rate and temperature at lower temperatures or at higher strain rates. This behavior is consistent with the observation that overcoming the intrinsic Peierls stress is shown to be the rate-controlling mechanism in these materials at low temperatures. The dependence of yield stress on temperature and strain rate was found to decrease, while the strain-hardening rate increased with tungsten alloying content. The mechanical threshold stress (MTS) model was adopted to model the stress-strain behavior of unalloyed Ta and the Ta-W alloys. Parameters for the constitutive relations for Ta and the Ta-W alloys were derived for the MTS model, the Johnson-Cook (JC), and the Zerilli-Armstrong (ZA) models. The results of this study substantiate the applicability of these models for describing the high strain-rate deformation of Ta and Ta-W alloys. The JC and ZA models, however, due to their use of a power strain-hardening law, were found to yield constitutive relations for Ta and Ta-W alloys that are strongly dependent on the range of strains for which the models were optimized.
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