An integrated creep model based on internal stress evolution

In creep design, not only secondary creep but also primary and tertiary creep regimes become important for an accurate creep life prediction and need to be accounted for in more sophisticated models. Mechanism-based theories showed a better potential since they usually leads to more accurate prediction over wider range of stress and temperature. It has long been recognized that the mechanics and kinetics of the deformation and recovery processes occurring at the microscale are determined by, amongst other things, the local effective stress while, at macroscopic level, it may still possible to discern an effective stress, which is different from the applied stress that drives the creep strain accumulation, [1]. Recently, the authors proposed an internal stress based model for primary creep, which is independent on the creep rate formulation at the steady state, ensuring the continuity of the creep curve at the transition between primary and secondary creep stages, [2]. In this work, in order to account for all creep stages, this modeling framework is extended further. In particular, for tertiary creep stage, it is assumed that the occurrence of microstructural modifications (such as fine particle dissolution, secondary phase precipitations, etc.) is the process responsible for the reduction of the internal stress and consequent increase of the creep rate as result of the increment of the effective stress. The possibility to derive the internal stress decay function from tertiary creep data is discussed. The proposed model has been applied to P91 high chromium steel and preliminary results are presented in this work.