SOME EFFECTS OF RANDOM CREEP CAVITY PLACEMENT ALONG A PLANAR GRAIN-BOUNDARY

The purpose of the work is to investigate the effects of random cavity placement in the two-dimensional case in which the grain boundary is planar. The configuration analyzed consists of a perfect bicrystal having a number of cavities located at randomly placed sites on the grain boundary. The analysis presented deals with a simplified representation of the actual physical situation, with the effects of polycrystalline structure, large populations of cavities, nucleation and coalescence, nonuniform distributions of cavity sizes, and different modes of cavity growth being ignored. However, to simulate the evolution of a nonuniform size distribution by the finite element technique used would require the finite element mesh to be reformulated on each increment of cavity growth. Such a simulation would present numerical difficulties.