Factors contributing to creep strengthening in discontinuously-reinforced materials

There have been several experimental investigations of the creep behavior of materials with discontinuous reinforcement. For these materials, logarithmic plots of the steady-state or minimum strain rate against the applied stress usually reveal significant curvature such that the stress exponent, determined from the slope of the line, increases with decreasing stress. Plots of this nature are usually interpreted by invoking a threshold stress, sigma(o) and replacing the applied stress, sigma, with an effective stress, defined as (sigma - sigma(o)). This paper examines the implications of this approach using published creep data for several aluminum-based materials. It is shown that the introduction of an effective stress leads to a stress exponent that is similar to that observed in the unreinforced matrix material but, nevertheless, the creep rates in the reinforced materials are often significantly slower than in the matrix. This difference is examined with reference to the occurrence of load transfer and substructure strengthening. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.