Mechanisms for tertiary creep of single crystal superalloy

During the thermal-mechanical loading of high temperature single crystal turbine components, all three creep—stages: primary, secondary and tertiary, manifest themselves and, hence, none of them can be neglected. The development of a creep law that includes all three stages is especially important in the case of non-homogeneous thermal loading of the component where significant stress redistribution and relaxation will result. Thus, local creep analysis is crucial for proper design of damage tolerant airfoils. We have developed a crystallographic-based constitutive model and fully coupled it with damage kinetics. The model extends existing approaches for cyclic and thermal-cyclic loading of anisotropic elasto-viscoplastic deformation behavior and damage kinetics of single-crystal materials, allowing prediction of tertiary creep and failure initiation of high temperature components. Our damage model bridges the gap between dislocation dynamics and the continuum mechanics scales and can be used to represent tertiary as well as primary and secondary creep.