Power law creep damage is one of the most intriguing unsolved phenomena of materials science. Models based on continuum mechanics generally predict a much higher strain to failure, as well as a much longer creep lifetime than experimentally observed values. This thesis highlights two aspects of this problematic by analyzing creep damage in copper using in situ synchrotron tomography and 3D reconstruction of the damaged polycrystal structure by serial sectioning.Damage in terms of the area fraction of voids was first identified in slices of tomographic reconstructions of creep deformed copper. The local and global evolution of cavities area fraction was checked against the Cocks and Ashby model and it was found that the model overestimates creep lifetime and underestimates damage development. The importance of the initial damage heterogeneity and the role of damage localization are also emphasized. It was found that the amplitude of the largest damage fluctuation increases parabolically as a function of cavity’s mean area fraction.An improved serial sectioning method based on surface profilometry was developed, which allows the accurate measurement of the removed local material thickness. The 3D reconstructions enabled identifying the creep voids and the grains of the polycrystal. It was shown that with the exception of the void shape, the relationship between void location at a given grain boundary and crystallographic orientation of the neighbor grains is similar in samples deformed by different creep mechanisms. The relative population of creep voids is higher at simple grain boundaries than at triple junctions. Voids found at a triple boundary, however, are larger.
