Making creep data sheets, (1)

High temperature structures such as thermal power plants, nuclear reactors, petroleum and synthetic chemistry reactors are used for 10 to 30 years at high temperature and high pressure. Accordingly, the accurate grasp of the long hour creep characteristics of structural materials is necessary for securing the safety and reliability of installations in the design, construction, operation and maintenance. The National Research Institute for Metals has carried out creep test and creep rupture test aiming at 100,000 hours required for proving the design allowable stress for more than 40 kinds of the high temperature use metals produced in Japan since 1966, and the results have been published as the data sheets. About 350 charges of the materials on the market same as actually used heat resistant steel and alloys were sampled and tested with more than 1000 creep testing machines systematically. 54 data sheets on 32 kinds of the materials have been published so far. These data sheets include large quantity of long hour creep data which are very difficult to obtain, and have been regarded as one of the standard high temperature strength data collections in the world. (Kako, I.)