When materials scientists study creep of metals and alloys, much more sophisticated experiments are usually conducted. The alloys are precisely machined into test specimens, the testing temperature is ...

The gains are probably best illustrated in the field of material science, in which the number of publications has grown from almost none in the early 1980s to the largest in the world now.

A NIMS research team fabricated heat-resistant steel test specimens using laser powder bed fusion (LPBF)—a form of metal 3D printing—and subjected them to creep testing for up to 10,000 hours.