Estimating the remanent creep life of power plant components

This paper examines the current status of remanent creep life assessment methods for power plant components. Consideration is given mainly to predictive techniques based on post-service examination and testing with application to low alloy ferritic components in fossil plant. The requirements for producing methodologies, namely the development of mechanistic and parametric models for creep damage and failure, are discussed together with aspects on the measurement of the relevant creep damage feature or property. Techniques considered include physical and mechanical property measurement, metallographic examination, strain measurement, and accelerated creep and rupture testing. Methods based on accelerated testing are discussed in detail; extrapolative techniques and application of the life fraction rule are considered both from an experimental and mechanistic viewpoint. Finally, attention is given to the choice of representative stress to apply to uniaxial data. The influence of material parameters on the representative stress is emphasized and upper and lower bounds appropriate to creep brittle and creep ductile material states are considered.