Abstract: The doping of phosphorus, sulfur and boron in IN718 superalloy can remarkably influence the creep behavior. The modifications of the minor elements seem not to vary the stress exponent and the influences primarily concentrate on the effective diffusion coefficient. A pronounced beneficial interaction between P and B and a weaker detrimental interaction between P and S have been obtained. The preexponential frequency constant is proved to be strongly related with the creep activation energy because of the so-called compensation effect. The compensation temperature has been determined to be about 1080 K, which corresponds to the transformation temperature from rapidly coarsened gamma " phase to delta phase. It has been proposed that trace elements can influence the effective diffusion coefficient individually or cooperatively, which in turn either retard or speed the creep process.

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