Abstract
On the basis of Mott's suggestion that intracrystalline deformation in creep takes place by fine slip, and that the activation energy is that for the motion of screw dislocations impeded by jogs, expressions for the high-temperature transient and equilibrium creep rates are obtained in terms of the applied stress, the temperature, the grain size and the characteristics of the intragranular substructure. The equations give a good interpretation of the known creep behaviour of a number of metals as reported in the literature. The synthesis is based primarily on lead as, in conjunction with the present experiments, the available literaure provides a fairly comprehensive account of the creep of both single crystals and polycrystals of this metal.