Fundamentals of Creep Behavior

Creep Basics
Creep is the mechanism that limits the maximum operating temperature of many systems that are dependent on high temperatures for their efficiency. It consists of a slow accumulation of plastic deformation under sustained stresses well below the yield strength. It occurs in all materials at all temperatures but becomes a problem of practical interest for temperatures in the region of 30 to 40% of the melting temperature on an absolute scale. Plastics therefore creep noticeably at ambient temperature, as do zinc and tin alloys such as solders and die-cast components. Iron based alloys used in process equipment start to see significant effects of creep above about 700F while the threshold is more like 1200 to 1500F in nickel or cobalt based alloys. Despite the important role played by creep in defining the operating conditions in many important engineering systems, with some exceptions it has been taken into account in somewhat simplistic ways until relatively recently, being viewed as an essentially material-based limitation on allowable stresses, rather than the fundamental deformation and damage related process it really is [1]. All this has changed in recent years, in large part due to two developments driven by the global needs for more and more economical energy. These are increased pressure to extend the life of existing equipment through fitness-for-service evaluation [2], and a resurgence of interest in nuclear power [3]. Both of these fields have challenges posed by operation at extreme elevated temperatures as well as economic and regulatory requirements for more detailed and accurate predictions of performance in the future. Interest in creep, which flourished in the 60s and 70s but faded in subsequent years, has therefore seen a renewal of interest and with it a need to revisit much of the good work done several decades ago to relearn things that may have been forgotten or are only dimly recalled today. Creep deformation is conventionally presented as a plot of accumulated strain versus time (Figure 1). This curve is commonly broken up into three phases: Primary, Secondary or steady state creep, and Tertiary. Most of the early work on prediction of component performance concentrated on the first two phases, and much of it only recognized secondary creep, which is com-

A Review of the Fundamentals of Creep Deformation and Damage

Creep Strain
Secondary

Tertiary

Rupture

Primary

Realistic Primary

Realistic Tertiary

TIME
Figure 1: Real and ideal creep curves

minimun creep rate, mcr

or

monly assumed to conform with a so-called Bailey-Norton n-power law, named for the two British investigators who separately proposed to represent the nonlinear stress dependence of creep by the relationship [4, 5].

dc = Kn dt
Today it is appreciated that real creep curves for engineering alloys tend to have very little in the way of primary creep and, in fact, spend most of their lives in an extended tertiary phase which rather spoils a lot of the methods dating back several decades, which have found their way into libraries of standard material properties provided as an integral part of many industry standard finite element programs. A big step in the right direction has been the introduction within the past decade of the Omega model, developed by MPC and forming a part of the joint ASME/API 579 FFS Standard [2]. This model, in effect, includes tertiary behavior by addition of an exponential term to the original Bailey-Norton law,

dc = c()exp(c ) dt

Where, c() is a more general function than the simple power law, and is a parameter that determines how quickly tertiary creep becomes significant. For example, if = 100, the exponential term, and therefore tertiary behavior starts getting important when c exceeds 1%. A more intuitive version of this equation would have been,

extremely high powered electron microscope which has since been dismantled. The fact is that for most of the life of a typical creep test, voids are too small to have any effect on the stress level or the creep rate. It has been concluded that tertiary creep derives primarily from softening , due to exposure for extended periods of time at temperature with or without inducement from creep or plastic strains. In a simple tensile specimen, strain induced softening is a bad thing, as it leads to early failure by loss of section strength. In a complex structural component however, where the weakened material is not free to go off on its own, the effect can actually be beneficial because it allows weakened material to offload onto adjacent, less heavily loaded material, and thus distribute the damage process so that failure takes longer and is more gradual when it does occur. A component, such as some welds which have limited capability to display tertiary creep, reach their limit, form a local crack and can unzip in a catastrophic way. So, tertiary creep can actually be good for you. Accumulation of creep damage depends on both the creep strain and the stress state . It is not always appreciated that, in complex structures, the hydrostatic component of stress (the average of the principal stresses) has a significant influence on damage processes of all kinds. For instance, the effective stress producing creep damage in a pressurized tube can be 10 to 15% more severe than in an equivalent simple tensile test, and 3 times more severe at the tip of a sharp crack or notch. When you take into account the fact that the damage rate is itself a highly nonlinear function of the effective stress, constraint leading to high levels of hydrostatic stress can produce dramatic reductions in creep rupture life.

dc = ()exp c c MG dt

( )

Where, MG is the Monkman-Grant strain [2] (see Figure 1), but is now the accepted notation. Creep deformation as such is usually not a problem in its own right, except perhaps where buckling is concerned. The more urgent problem is the fact that creep deformation causes damage , leading to rupture failures at strains often much less than the short term ductility. There is a longstanding debate about the exact nature of creep damage. The common wisdom for many years has been that it is synonymous with tertiary creep, that creep deformation encourages the formation of microscopic voids, which weaken the material leading to an increased creep rate and, finally, failure. It is true that the kind of creep rupture that is most worrisome in practice is invariably the result of voids forming on sliding grain boundaries, coalescing into fissures and eventually leading to failure of the part by separation into two pieces, either by formation of a crack or by a leak. A typical progression of void related damage is illustrated in Figure 2. However, this process does not necessarily contribute to increased creep rates until very late in the day, when failure is already imminent for other reasons.

REFERENCES
1. ASME BPV Code, Sections I and VIII/Div 1, 2007 2. API 579-1/ASME FFS-1, JUNE 5, 2007 (API 579 2nd Edition) FITNESS-FOR-SERVICE 3. GEN IV/NGNP Materials Project, Project administered by ASME Standards Technology, LLC on behalf of US Department of Energy, 2008. 4. I. Finnie and W.R. Heller, Creep of Engineering Materials, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., NY, Toronto, London, 1959. 5. R.K. Penny and D.L. Marriott, Design for Creep, 2nd Ed. Chapman and Hall, London, NY, Tokyo, Melbourne, Madras, 1995

Figure 2: Creep strain and damage Studies of microstructure in materials during creep, notably the work done by MPC as part of the Omega program, show that tertiary creep can occur without any signs of void formation. This may be a matter of magnification, because the British National Physical Laboratory did detect void initiation in nickel alloys very early in life, at less than 10% of the rupture life, but only with an

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