Determination of Creep Properties From Small Punch Test

The small punch test is one of the techniques, which can directly assess the current material properties of components on situ. The main advantages of this method are that only small amount of material is needed and no repair is required afterwards. In addition, the test itself is rather simple to perform. Since early 1980’s, the technique has been developed and applied to nuclear reactors, electric power plants for safety assessment. European researchers have carried out the pioneer work on small punch testing at the creep region. Recently the European Code of Practice documents are available for both high and low temperature properties, which summarizes the international experiences in last 20 years and provides a guide line to perform small punch test for metallic materials. This paper gives an overview of the research work on determination of creep properties from small punch test. Verification is performed by comparison of creep properties derived by small punch test and uni-axial tests. An agreement is found and shows that small punch test is able to predict reasonable creep properties of materials. Considerations how to improve the approach are also addressed. Further work is needed as available tests are still limited. This paper makes a starting point that others can improve further.