Study on creep-fatigue evaluation procedures for high-chromium steels—Part I: Test results and life prediction based on measured stress relaxation

Strong demand for improving thermal efficiency of power generation plants promoted the use of high-chromium steels, which have high creep strength and corrosion resistance. Aiming at cost reduction for future nuclear power plants, these materials are also regarded as candidates for structural materials, being favoured for lower thermal expansion rate compared with austenitic stainless steels. In structural design and life management of these plants, failure due to the combination of fatigue and creep damages has been considered as an important phenomenon to be evaluated, in addition to simple creep failure under sustained loading such as inner pressure. The author has been conducting a series of creep-fatigue tests for three types of high-chromium steels used in fossil power plants and the applicability of life prediction methods has been studied. It was found that the time fraction rule gives a relatively small amount of creep damage and overpredicts the failure life, whereas a simple ductility exhaustion method provides very large creep damage which leads to too conservative prediction of failure lives. A modified ductility exhaustion method developed on the re-definition of creep damage as a ductility consumer gave a moderate amount of creep damage and provided reasonable life predictability. Moreover, an empirical formula was derived which can represent the life reduction in compressive hold tests as a function of pure fatigue life and hold time.