Research Projects

The proposal aims to develop a bending creep based technology and the required science for assessment of residual life of materials in power generation, enabling a designer to make intelligent life predictions. The methodology is based on testing miniaturized samples, which will, thereby proffer extracting very small volume of material from in-service components without impairing their integrity or interrupting regular operation. Miniaturized cantilever samples will be micro-machined from virgin and in-service components supplied by BHEL. Bending creep tests on these samples will be performed at high temperatures and various stresses in industrially relevant range for obtaining critical creep parameters, such as stress exponent and activation energy, and establishing microstructure-property relationship. The obtained results from bending creep will be validated against the uniaxial tests using ASTM standard samples. Development of such a small-scale test methodology will be of practical utility in many other branches of materials engineering, including welded joints, cladding and tubes in nuclear reactors which experience varied radiation dosage across their section thickness.