A previously developed approach to the description of plastic deformation was applied here to an analysis of creep. Plastic deformation was considered to be the evolution of a dislocation ensemble, including dislocation transformations and the processes of generation and annihilation of dislocations. On the assumption of a spatially uniform distribution of dislocations, a set of first-order differential equations was obtained which described the time-dependence of the amount of plastic deformation and the densities of dislocations of various types. It was shown that this approach permitted the description of the entire evolution of the time-dependence of deformation; including various creep stages, and transitions between them. It was also shown how the shape of creep curves was affected by changes in the parameters that characterized dislocation transformations and dislocation-source operation.

Description of Creep with Allowance for Dislocation Multiplication and Transformations. M.A.Ivanov, B.A.Greenberg: The Physics of Metals and Metallography, 2006, 101[3], 231-41