Modelling Creep Behaviour of Superheater Materials

The energy demand of human being is ever increasing. The naturally available energy resources are in a crude form and need conversion to one which is readily available for end use. Power plants play the role of this conversion process. Majority of the conversion processes take place at severe conditions of very high temperature and high pressure. Hence, power plant components always exhibit inelastic behaviours like creep and fatigue. The design of such components should take these inelastic behaviours in to consideration. This work focuses on modelling the creep behaviour of superheater materials. Specifically, creep constitutive model of T91 steel which is commonly used for constructing superheater tubes is developed and validated with results from experimental work. Then a material user subroutine has been written to incorporate the model in commercial software ABAQUS.