Abstract
Creep and stress relaxation phenomena in solids are usually interpreted in terms of the theory of stress-aided thermal activation. The activation volume, a key parameter of this theory, is found to be related to the stress in a unique way irrespective of the microstructure of the solid. This must be considered as a serious weakness of this theory. In this work a simple cooperative model is proposed producing the same exponential type relation between the flow rate and stress as the activation theory. However, the parameters of the model comply in a more natural way with experimental evidence. The model used is reminiscent of that used for calculating equilibria in systems obeying Bose-Einstein statistics. This type of statistics seems to represent the simplest way of describing a system of interacting flow units tending to undergo coupled transitions when activated.
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