Intergranular cavity damage and creep fracture of 1Cr–0·5Mo steels

Numerical simulation of grain-size effects on creep crack growth by means of grain elements

“…An indirect effect of increasing the grain size can enter through an increase in the cavity nucleation rate (higher F, see e.g. [9]). Assuming nucleation and diffusional cavity growth to be uncoupled, this will decrease the characteristic time for nucleation, tnue, and thus increase the damage zone.…”

“…[7,8]) or to a higher density of second-phase particles resulting from the heat treatment to produce the coarse grain size (e.g. [8,9]). A second class of explanations relates the observations to the fact that triple grain junctions can act as barriers to crack growth (e.g.…”