Diffusive intergranular cavity growth in creep in tension and torsion

Creep experiments were performed at 500 C in tension and torsion on high conductivity copper tubes with a uniform initial coverage of implanted water vapor bubbles on all grain boundaries. No significant differences were found in the times to fracture over a wide stress range when the results were correlated according to the maximum principal tensile stress in the two fields. The results indicate that the cavities grow in a crack-like mode but at one tenth the rate predicted from the theoretical model of Pharr and Nix. This difference is attributed partly to load shedding from boundaries normal to the maximum principal tensile stress to slanted boundaries, and partly to a lack of knowledge about th surface diffusion constant. The results indicate further that the contribution to intergranular cavity growth by power-law creep in negligible in comparison to the contribution by diffusional flow. Complementary tension and torsion experiments performed in initially uncavitated samples results in shorter creep lives in torsion than in tension due to more effective cavity nucleation in the former. The times to fracture in both of these cases obey Monkman and Grant's law, indicating the presence of constraints on growth by the lagging deformations by power-law creep in the surroundings of the cavitating isolated grain facets