Fracture Mechanics Approach to Stress Corrosion

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) is used as a generic term to describe any behavior in which a combination of a static load and an aggressive environment results in the generation and propagation of a crack by corrosion. Stress corrosion has been treated from the electrochemical point of view in Chap. 17 and with a chemical-metallurgical approach in Chap. 18 for the important cases of hydrogen embrittlement and sensitization embrittlement of metals. We shall now study SCC from a mechanical point of view showing how fracture mechanics, in particular, originally developed to treat brittle fracture of World War II ships and later used in the treatment of fatigue crack propagation (see Chap. 10 ) can be also applied to treat the mysterious world of stress corrosion. It has been said in Sect. 17 that the study of corrosion had evidenced the fundamental role played by the combination of a specific material with a specific environment.