Small punch test method assessment for the determination of the residual creep life of service exposed components: outcomes from an interlaboratory exercise

Creep damage in small punch creep specimens of Type 304 stainless steel

“…Localized necking occurs near the side of the edge of the contacting area between the ball and specimen and a circumferential crack initiates at the necking location, which leads to final fracture. Specimen C shows that initial failure occurs at the bottom surface, about 0.8 mm away from the centre which agrees well with [12].…”

“…Development of the method has been driven by the need to measure in-service degradation of mechanical properties with a limited volume of available material [2]. In the past decade, the small punch test has been used successfully to characterize the mechanical strength, impact toughness, and fracture properties of materials with specimens measuring only 0.5 mm in thickness by Bulloch [3][4][5], Dobes [6][7][8], Baek et al [9], Fleury [10,11], Ule [12], and Komazai et al [13], Yang and Wang [14] presented a numerical model in which the primary and the secondary creep stages were calculated but creep damage was not considered.…”

The relationship between the Uniaxial Creep Test and the Small Punch Creep Test of the AZ31 magnesium alloy

“…Another important difference with the UCT is that the stress distribution in SPCT changes throughout the test because of a redistribution of the stresses in the specimen [26]. Moreover, in the SPCT specimens, initial plastic deformations appear at the moment when the load is applied, and it causes a large number of dislocations [27,28] compared to the Uniaxial Creep Test. This effect can be also observed in the creep curves, where it can be observed that the primary creep in SPCT's is larger than in UCT's.…”

An evidence of high strain rate superplasticity at intermediate homologous temperatures in an Al–Zn–Mg–Cu alloy processed by high-pressure torsion

“…SPT is a mechanical testing technique used in the power generation and nuclear industry [17], usually applied in fracture mechanics studies of pieces in service [18,19] and also in creep testing [20][21][22]. In this work, SPT was selected for the evaluation of mechanical behavior at high temperatures because it has the same axial symmetry as HPT processing and the small amount of material required for samples.…”