Boiler tubes operating at high temperatures under significant pressure are vulnerable to stress rupture failures. This chapter examines the cause, effect, and appearance of such failures. It discusses the conditions and mechanisms that either lead to or are associated with stress rupture, including overheating, high-temperature creep, graphitization, and dissimilar metal welds. It explains how to determine which mechanisms are in play by interpreting fracture patterns and microstructural details. It also describes the investigation of several carbon and low-alloy steel tubes that failed due to stress rupture.

This chapter focuses on creep-rupture failure, or more precisely, the time required for such a failure to occur at a given stress and temperature. It begins with a review of creep-rupture phenomena and the various ways creep-rupture data are presented and analyzed. It then examines a large collection of creep-rupture data corresponding to different alloy designations and heat treatments, identifying key relationships, similarities, and differences. It also presents a test method developed by the authors in which twelve materials are tested over a range of temperature, stress, and time in order to determine multiheat constants that are then used to fit multiheat data from other materials and thus estimate rupture times.

This data set contains the results of uniaxial creep rupture tests for a wide range of aluminum casting alloys conducted at temperatures from 100 to 315 deg C. In most cases, tests were made of several lots of material of each alloy and temper, the results were analyzed, and the averages were normalized to the room-temperature typical values. For some alloys, "representative" values (raw data) rather than typical values are provided.