Perspectives in Creep Fracture is a collection of studies that covers the advances in the analysis of the mechanisms involved in the process of creep fracture. The book presents nine articles that present data and discuss the theoretical advancement in the field. The text first covers the mechanisms leading to fracture in metals and ceramics, and then proceeds to tackling the problem of the nucleation of creep damage. Next, the book details the models for the growth of cracks and voids by diffusion and by plastic processes. The next two chapters deal with the creep fracture of ceramics. In the eighth chapters, the text examines the development and propagation of creep cracks. The last chapter details the theory involved in the propagation of cracks by cavitation. The book will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners of materials engineering, metallurgy, and other fields involved in fracture mechanics.

The first complete account of the physics of the creep and fracture of ice, for graduates, engineers and scientists.

Provides information from around the world on creep in multiple high-temperature metals, alloys, and advanced materials.

Fracture in structural materials remains a vital consideration in engineering systems, affecting the reliability of machines throughout their lives. Impressive advances in both the theoretical understanding of fracture mechanisms and practical developments that offer possibilities of control have re-shaped the subject over the past four decades. The contributors to this volume, including some of the most prominent researchers in the field, give their long-range perspectives of the research on the fracture of solids and its achievements. The subjects covered in this volume include: statistics of brittle fracture, transition of fracture from brittle to ductile, mechanics and mechanisms of ductile separation of heterogenous solids, the crack tip environment in ductile fracture, and mechanisms and mechanics of fatigue. Materials considered range from the usual structural solids to composites. The chapters include both theoretical points of view and discussions of key experiments. Contributors include: from MIT, A.S. Argon, D.M. Parks; from Cambridge, M.F. Ashby; from U.C. Santa Barbara, A.G. Evans, R. McMeeking; from Glasgow, J. Hancock; from Harvard, J.W. Hutchinson, J.R. Rice; from Sheffield, K.J. Miller; from Brown, A. Needleman; from the Ecole des Mines, A. Pineau; from U.C. Berkeley, R. O. Ritchie; and from Copenhagen, V. Tvergaard.

The use of new engineering materials in the aerospace and space industry is usually governed by the need for enhancing the bearing capacity of structural elements and systems, improving the performance of specific applications, reducing structural weight and improving its cost-effectiveness. Crystalline composites and nanomaterials are used to design lightweight structural elements because such materials provide stiffness, strength and low density/weight. This book reviews the effect of high temperature creep on structural system response, and provides new phenomenological creep models (deterministic and probabilistic approach) of composites and nanomaterials. Certain criteria have been used in selecting the creep functions in order to describe a wide range of different behavior of materials. The experimental testing and evaluation of time variant creep in composite and nanomaterials is quite complex, expensive and, at times, time consuming. Therefore, the analytical analysis of creep properties and behavior of structural elements made of composite and nanocomposite materials subjected to severe thermal loadings conditions is of great practical importance. Composite elements and heterogeneous materials, from which they are made, make essential changes to the classical scheme for constructing the phenomenological creep model of composite elements, because it reflects the specificity of the composite material and manifests itself in the choice of two basic functions of the creep constitutive equation, namely memory and instantaneous modulus of elasticity functions. As such, the concepts and analytical techniques presented here are important. But the principal objective of this book is to demonstrate how nonlinear viscoelastic engineering creep theory can be incorporated into the general theory of mechanics of materials so that composite components can be designed and analyzed. The results are supported by step-by-step practical structural design examples and will be useful for structural engineers, code developers as well as material science researchers and university faculty. The phenomenological creep models presented in this book provide a usable engineering approximation for many applications in composite engineering.