Effects of Stress Level and Stress State on Creep Ductility: Evaluation of Different Models

The last few decades have witnessed an increasing emphasis on the development of strain-based approach for predicting the creep life or damage of components operating at elevated temperatures. Creep ductility, as a key parameter in this approach, may vary with a number of factors including strain rate, state of stress, operating temperature, material microstructure, etc. The present paper, however, is focused on reviewing the state-of-the-art understanding of the effects of stress level and stress state on the creep ductility. Mechanisms involving the void growth and coalescence are presented to describe the role of stress level in the variation of uniaxial creep ductility. The prediction capacity of existing empirical ductility models is also assessed in light of uniaxial test data. On the other hand, a vast body of multiaxial creep test data, collected from open literature, is utilized to examine the influence of the state of stress on the creep ductility. Then, a variety of multiaxial ductility factor models are introduced and evaluated with the available experimental data. Finally, a brief discussion on the dependence of creep ductility on the stress triaxiality and Lode parameter, predicted by numerical methods, is provided.