High temperature creep cavitation mechanisms in a continuously cast high purity copper

Continuously cast high purity copper was used to study intergranular high temperature creep fracture mechanisms. With the help of an internal marker system due to impurity segregation, grain boundary sliding, GBS, was found to have occurred to a similar extent on cavitated and uncavitated boundaries. To explain this phenomenon a void nucleation model involving small nonwetting shearable particles is suggested. Metallographic observations and the apparent activation energy derived from fracture time data indicate the operation of the vacancy condensation mechanism at the lower temperatures and higher stresses. At the higher temperatures and lower stresses void growth is enhanced by GBS. This cavitation mechanism obtains strong support from measurements of the distribution of voids on grain boundaries as a function of the boundary angle with respect to the tensile direction. Computer analysis of these distributions, in terms of a model which properly accounts for the distribution of potential nuclei, yields bimodal curves exhibiting peaks at grain boundaries oriented for high shear stress (peak I), and for high normal stress (peak II). A phenomenological equation is proposed for the dependence of peak I on test conditions. Peak II is thought to be caused by nucleation by local GBS and growth by vacancy condensation under locally enhanced normal stress.