Advances in Creep of Metals and Alloys

Dear Colleagues,

In the last decades of the 20th century, some important advances were gained in the understanding of the steady-state creep of metallic materials. In particular, the temperature dependence and the role of lattice self-diffusion were definitively accepted to explain the phenomenon. However, despite its apparent simplicity, we are still far from a complete description of the creep of metals and alloys. The contribution of applied stress to the creep of metallic materials still represents an exciting challenge. This cannot be achieved without a microstructural-based justification of the power law creep for a wide range of stress exponents and the Garofalo (sinh) equation. This panorama has been recently enriched, and in somehow complicated again, with the appearance of very complex microstructures in additive manufacturing materials.

In a continuous effort, the scientific community is looking for new approaches to the problem and is seeking to increase the number of tools dedicated to definitively describing the creep behavior of metallic materials. These include the statistical and stochastic treatment of data, the use of simulation and modelling tools (e.g., molecular dynamics, crystal plasticity models, and discrete dislocation dynamics), the application of heuristic and probabilistic optimization, the use of nanoindentation techniques at high temperature, in-situ testing, and new descriptions of materials’ microstructures as fractals.

For this Special Issue, we welcome the submission of original research articles, communications, and reviews on recent advances in the creep of metals and alloys, with a special interest in the assessment of models and their application to real components. Apart from that, we are also interested in contributions about new in-field and lab testing, current trends in simulation and modelling, the latest advances in the description of creep at the micro and meso scales, and the characterization of microstructures at high temperature.

All of these contributions will provide a deep insight into creep that will greatly improve the present prediction capacities and the assessment of facilities working at high temperature.

Dr. Ricardo Fernández Serrano
Dr. Qiang Xu
Guest Editors

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• creep
• metallic materials
• meso-scale
• statistical analysis
• modelling
• simulation
• nanoindentation
• in-situ testing
• additive manufacturing
• components assessment