Advanced Ductility Exhaustion Methods for the Calculation of Creep Damage during Creep-Fatigue Cycling

The thermal mechanical cycling of high temperature components can result in creep-fatigue cycles in which the creep dwell has a wide variety of positions within the cycle. During in-phase cycling the creep dwell is placed at the maximum strain in the cycle. Out of phase cycling gives compressive dwells and phase cycling between 0 and 180 gives a cycle in which the dwell is placed before the maximum strain is reached, i.e., at an intermediate position within the cycle. Furthermore, components often experience cycles with a variety of different strain amplitudes, which can result in cycle sequencing effects. The effects of these different types of creep dwells have been investigated as part of the development programme for the R5 High Temperature Life Assessment Procedure. The materials included in the R5 programme were two low alloy ferritic steels; a cast 1CrMoV and a cast 1/2 CrMoV and three austenitic stainless steels; a type 316H steel, a cast type 304L, and a type 347 weld metal. The analysis of these tests has resulted in the proposal of a new method to calculate creep damage. This has been shown to give better predictions for the creep damage at failure in laboratory tests compared with both the current R5 ductility exhaustion approach and the time fraction approach, which is used in typical design codes such as ASME III and RCC-MR. In particular, the new method gives significantly improved predictions of creep damage at failure for creep-fatigue cycles with intermediate dwells and for cycles with low strain ranges, which are of particular relevance to the service cycles in real plant. This paper reviews the findings of the work on the new method, the effects of multiaxial states of stress and the effects of compressive dwells.