Rate of change of J‐integral in creep‐fatigue condition

The operational conditions in next generation power plants and other high temperature applications such as turbine blades in jet engines demand the component to perform under extreme conditions where metallic materials show time dependent deformation under cyclic loading conditions. Under creep‐fatigue loading condition, the crack tip is exposed to both time dependent and independent plastic deformation. Conventional crack characterizing parameters such as (C ) has shown good correlation with dominant damage‐based crack velocity, (d /d ) . However, the true definition or prediction of crack driving forces under such scenario are vague due to limited theoretical validity of the conventional crack tip characterizing parameters, such as or C . In this work, the concept of configurational forces are applied for the first time to understand the creep‐fatigue crack growth behavior. The crack growth is simulated using node‐release technique and the configurational forces are calculated using post processing the finite element results for calculation of d /d .