A new procedure is presented for determining the Tanaka formulation of the constitutive equation representing the dependence of peak stressσpon temperatureTand strain rateεderived from torsion tests on 316 stainless steel:whereα, nandT’are constants. The peak strainεpis shown to be linearly dependent onσp. The flow curves up to the peak can be calculated by the equationwhere c is a constant evaluated as 0.193 and is associated with average errors of less than 2%. The constitutive constants are compared with those in the literature for similar stainless steels.