Environment Sensitive Fracture and its Prevention

Abstract

Before appropriate preventative measures can be chosen to avoid any corrosion problem the latter needs to be anticipated and predictability possibly poses greater difficulties in relation to stress corrosion than many other modes of corrosion related failure. Consequently some recent work on predicting environmental requirements for stress corrosion cracking is considered, as are the less stringent requirements for corrosion fatigue. The increasing volume of evidence on the importance of strain rate in stress corrosion crack growth in some systems implies that distinction between that mode of failure and corrosion fatigue at very low frequencies can be pointless, and there are important consequences here for engineering design approaches to avoiding these modes of failure. The paper concludes with a discussion of some aspects of the various approaches to preventing environment sensitive fracture.