Deformation and crack growth response under cyclic creep conditions

To increase energy efficiency, new plants must operate at higher and higher temperatures. Moreover, power generation equipment continues to age and is being used far beyond its intended original design life. Some recent failures which unfortunately occurred with serious consequences have clearly illustrated that current methods for insuring safety and reliability of high temperature equipment is inadequate. Because of these concerns, an understanding of the high-temperature crack growth process is very important and has led to the following studies of the high temperature failure process. This effort summarizes the results of some recent studies which investigate the phenomenon of high temperature creep fatigue crack growth. Experimental results which detail the process of creep fatigue, analytical studies which investigate why current methods are ineffective, and finally, a new approach which is based on the T*-integral and its ability to characterize the creep-fatigue crack growth process are discussed. The potential validity of this new predictive methodology is illustrated