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Superplastic forming of Ni and Ti based alloys is widely used in aerospace industry. The main advantage of using the effect of superplasticity in sheet metal forming processes is a feasibility of forming materials with a high amount of plastic strain in conditions of prevailing tensile stresses. This article is dedicated to study commercial FEM software SFTC DEFORM application for prediction thickness deviation during low temperature superplastic forming of UFG Ti-6-4 alloy. Experimentally, thickness deviation during superplastic forming can be observed in the local area of plastic deformation and this process is aggravated by local softening of the metal and this is stipulated by microstructure coarsening. The theoretical model was prepared to analyze experimentally observed metal flow. Two approaches have been used for that. The first one is the using of integrated creep rheology model in DEFORM. As superplastic effect is observed only in materials with fine and ultrafine grain sizes the second approach is carried out using own user procedures for rheology model which is based on microstructure evolution equations. These equations have been implemented into DEFORM via Fortran user’s solver subroutines. Using of FEM simulation for this type of forming allows tracking a strain rate in different parts of a workpiece during a process, which is crucial for maintaining the superplastic conditions. Comparison of these approaches allows us to make conclusions about effect of microstructure evolution on metal flow during superplastic deformation. The results of the FEM analysis and theoretical conclusions have been approved by results of the conducted Erichsen test. The main issues of this study are as follows: a) the DEFORM software allows an engineer to predict formation of metal shape under the condition of low-temperature superplasticity; b) in order to augment the accuracy of the prediction of local deformations, the effect of the microstructure state of an alloy having sub-microcristalline structure should be taken into account in the course of calculations in the DEFORM software.

In this work, we analyze the system of contracts made by Russian defense enterprises in the process of state defense order execution. We conclude that methods of statistical mechanics can be applied to the description of the given system. Following the original grand-canonical ensemble approach, we can create the statistical ensemble under investigation as a set of instant snapshots of indistinguishable contracts having individual values. We show that due to government regulations of contract prices the contract system can be described in terms of nonextensive Tsallis statistics. We have found that probability distributions of contract prices correspond to deformed Bose – Einstein distributions obtained using nonextensive Tsallis entropy. This conclusion is true both in the case of the whole set of contracts and in the case of the contracts made by an individual defense company as a seller.

In order to analyze how deformed Bose – Einstein distributions fit the empirical contract price distributions we compare the corresponding cumulative distribution functions. We conclude that annual distributions of individual sales which correspond to each company’s contract (order) can be used as relevant data for contract price distributions analysis. The empirical cumulative distribution functions for the individual sales ranking of Concern CSRI Elektropribor, one of the leading Russian defense companies, are analyzed for the period 2007–2021. The theoretical cumulative distribution functions, obtained using deformed Bose – Einstein distributions in the case of «rare contract gas» limit, fit well to the empirical cumulative distribution functions. The fitted values for the entropic index show that the degree of nonextensivity of the system under investigations is rather high. It is shown that the characteristic prices of distributions can be estimated by weighing the values of annual individual sales with the escort probabilities. Given that the fitted values of chemical potential are equal to zero, we suggest that «gas of contracts» can be compared to photon gas in which the number of particles is not conserved.