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In materials science, creep (sometimes called cold flow) is the tendency of a solid material to undergo slow deformation while subject to persistent mechanical stresses.It can occur as a result of long-term exposure to high levels of stress that are still below the yield strength of the material.
There are three mechanisms acting in thermo-mechanical fatigue Creep is the flow of material at high temperatures; Fatigue is crack growth and propagation due to repeated loading; Oxidation is a change in the chemical composition of the material due to environmental factors. The oxidized material is more brittle and prone to crack creation.
Fatigue has traditionally been associated with the failure of metal components which led to the term metal fatigue. In the nineteenth century, the sudden failing of metal railway axles was thought to be caused by the metal crystallising because of the brittle appearance of the fracture surface, but this has since been disproved. [ 1 ]
In continuum mechanics, ratcheting, or ratchetting, also known as cyclic creep, is a behavior in which plastic deformation accumulates due to cyclic mechanical or thermal stress. [ 1 ] [ 2 ]
This is primarily due to keeping the structure in a strained condition for some finite interval of time hence causing some amount of plastic strain. This should not be confused with creep, which is a constant state of stress with an increasing amount of strain. Since relaxation relieves the state of stress, e equipment reactions.
A family of curves describing strain versus time response to various applied stress may be represented by a single viscoelastic creep modulus versus time curve if the applied stresses are below the material's critical stress value. Viscoelastic creep is important when considering long-term structural design.
F.R. Larson and J. Miller proposed that creep rate could adequately be described by the Arrhenius type equation: = / Where r is the creep process rate, A is a constant, R is the universal gas constant, T is the absolute temperature, and is the activation energy for the creep process.
Material failure theory is an interdisciplinary field of materials science and solid mechanics which attempts to predict the conditions under which solid materials fail under the action of external loads.