Growing demand for clean, affordable energy has driven the power industry towards generation plants with higher thermal efficiency and higher operating temperatures. ASTM Grade 91 is a high chromium (9Cr-1Mo) creep resistant steel commonly used in high temperature pressure vessel and piping applications. These service conditions often involve a combination of stationary and cyclic loads at elevated temperatures. Lifecycle assessments of components under such conditions require modeling of both creep and fatigue behaviors. This paper develops two approaches to modeling mixed creep and fatigue crack growth for lifetime assessment of high service temperature components. Both approaches model fatigue crack growth using the Paris law integrated over the number of lifetime cyclic reversals to obtain crack extension. A strip yield model is used to characterize the crack tip stress-strain fields.
The first approach employed an explicit method to approximate creep crack growth using C* as a crack tip parameter characterizing creep crack extension. The Norton power law was explicitly solved to model the primary and secondary stages of creep.
The second approach used an implicit method to solve a set of constitutive equations based on properties of the material microstructure to model all creep stages. Constitutive equations were fit to experimental data collected at stresses 10–60% of yield and temperatures 550–650°C. These methods were compared to published experimental data under purely stationary loads, purely cyclic loads and mixed loading. Both models showed good agreement with experimental data in the stress and temperature conditions considered.
