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Researchers analyse creep damage at the ESRF

09-05-2005

Creep damage by void nucleation and growth controls the lifetime of components subjected to loading at high temperatures. A team of researchers from the Technical University in Vienna, the Technical University in Berlin and the ESRF have combined tomography and diffraction in an experiment using high-energy synchrotron radiation on ID15 to follow in-situ void growth and microstructure development in bulk samples. The results have just been published in Science.

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The results reveal that void growth versus time follows an exponential growth law and that the formation of large void volumes coincides with texture evolution and a steady state in the development of dislocation density. Creep damage during a large proportion of sample creep life is homogeneous before damage localization occurs, which leads to rapid failure. The in-situ determination of void evolution in bulk samples opens up new ways toward the assessment of creep damage in metallic materials and subsequently towards lifetime predictions of samples and components subject to high temperature loading.

See more on this story at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/308/5718/92.pdf

Pyzalla et al., Simultaneous Tomography and Diffraction Analysis of Creep Damage, Science 308 (5718): 92.