HIGH-TEMPERATURE FRACTURE MECHANICS: A COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION WITH A CRITICAL REVIEW

The assessment of defects varies greatly in the industry, depending upon the comparison of the cost of this assessment with that of repair and the loss which might result from a defected structure. In the automobile industry, for instance, replacement of defective parts is usually cheaper than the assessment, but in the aeronautical industry no defects are accepted especially when they are operating in high stress and temperature fields. In such cases, the use of an engineering critical assessment to analyze defects is a necessity. However, an analyst has to work from incomplete information, especially when he is required to determine the failure conditions by relating the applied stress, material fracture properties, and the size of any defects present. This is due to the very limited standards and codes and the variety of parameters in the literature with some of them being cumbersome and the evaluation of which being complicated or not practical. The aim of this paper is to highlight the major proposed parameters for creep-crack growth and the current models, which are in use, and to describe their advantages and disadvantages.