Solute drag as an upper bound to high-temperature strength

There are some natural limits to the strength that may be obtained in materials by any alloy development efforts whatsoever, and similarly there are limits to the temperature at which a material may be used as a structural element. Two obvious limits are, respectively, the "theoretical strength" (or "lattice strength") and the melting temperature. This paper proposes that there is an additional limit, which combines strength and temperature criteria (and in addition the strain-rate). It is based on the famous "natural creep law", which is observed to hold in practice only in some special cases, but appears well suited to describe general limiting behavior. Materials include Ni sub 3 Al with 6 at.% Nb, and two Al-Mg alloys (of which Al-2Mg is one).