The creep stress exponent is commonly employed to characterize the deformation mechanism during the steady-state creep stage, serving as an indicator of creep behavior. The creep phenomenon of high melting point metallic materials is not obvious at room temperature. However, the nanoindentation method proves suitable for investigating the creep properties of metallic materials under such conditions. Consequently, this paper places emphasis on measuring the creep stress exponent of TC17 titanium alloy at room temperature using the load preservation stage of the nanoindentation method with a constant loading rate. In order to investigate the effects of loading rate and maximum load on the experimental results, different loading rates were applied to the diamond Berkovich indenter to reach different maximum loads. The indenter was held under the maximum load for a duration of 360 s, and the relationship between the indentation strain rate and indentation stress during the holding process was used to obtain the creep stress exponent of the material at room temperature. The findings indicate that within the loading rate range of 1.25 to 15 mN/s and maximum load range of 50 to 300 mN, the influence on the experimental results is insignificant. Ultimately, the distribution range of the creep stress exponent for TC17 titanium alloy at room temperature was measured to be 8.524-8.687.
Keywords: TC17; creep; creep stress exponent; nanoindentation.