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Formation of creep cavities in austenitic stainless steels

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Abstract

The possibility of creep cavity formation at subboundaries in austenitic stainless steels is analysed. It is demonstrated that such nucleation is thermodynamically feasible. A minimum stress must be exceeded in order to create cavities. The nucleation is assumed to take place where subboundaries on one side of a sliding grain boundary meet subgrain corners on the other side (double ledge models). Alternative cavitation positions can be found where particles meet subboundaries. The nucleation model can quantitatively predict the observed nucleation rate. The model gives a nucleation rate that is proportional to the creep rate in agreement with many experiments.

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Acknowledgement

Financial support through by the European Union (directorate-general for energy), within the project MACPLUS (ENER/FP7EN/249809/MACPLUS) in the framework of the Clean Coal Technologies is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank the China Scholarship Council (CSC) for funding a stipend (File No. 201207090009) for Junjing He.

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  1. Materials Science and Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 100 44, Stockholm, Sweden

    Junjing He & Rolf Sandström

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  1. Junjing He
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Correspondence to Junjing He.

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He, J., Sandström, R. Formation of creep cavities in austenitic stainless steels. J Mater Sci 51, 6674–6685 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-016-9954-z

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