The influence of the grain boundary structure on diffusional creep

An experiment was carried out to quantify the deformation in the diffusional creep domain. It was found that material had indisputably been deposited at grain boundaries in tension. A characterisation of 131 boundaries in terms of their misorientation was carried out and this was correlated to the observed deformation. Twin boundaries below a certain limit of deviation from an exact twin misorientation were totally inactive in the deformation. A large qualitative difference was found in the way general boundaries take part in the deformation. The experiments have taken place at Materials Research Department, Risoe National Laboratory at Roskilde. The present thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in physics at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. Besides the results of the creep experiment the thesis contains a description of the theoretical background to diffusional creep models. Also, the results from an investigation of helium bubble formation in an irradiated copper sample is included. (au)