Review of Environmentally Assisted Cracking

Many efforts have been made in the past by several researchers to arrive at some unifying principles governing the embrittlement phenomena. An inescapable conclusion reached by all these efforts was that the behavior is very complex. Hence, recognizing the complexity of material/environment behavior, we focus our attention here only in extracting some similarities in the experimental trends to arrive at some generic principles of behavior. Crack nucleation and growth are examined under static load in the presence of internal and external environments. Stress concentration, either pre-existing or in-situ generated, appears to be a requirement for embrittlement. A chemical stress concentration factor is defined for a given material/environment system as the ratio of failure stress with and without the damaging chemical environment. All factors that affect the buildup of the required stress concentration, such as planarity of slip, stacking fault energy, etc., also affect the stress-corrosion behavior. The chemical stress concentration factor is coupled with the mechanical stress concentration factor. In addition, generic features for all systems appear to be (a) an existence of a threshold stress as a function of concentration of the damaging environment and flow properties of the material, and (b) an existence of a limiting threshold as a function of concentration, indicative of a damage saturation for that environment. Kinetics of crack growth also depends on concentration and the mode of crack growth. In general, environment appears to enhance crack tip ductility on one side by the reduction of energy for dislocation nucleation and glide, and to reduce cohesive energy for cleavage, on the other. These two opposing factors are coupled to provide environmentally induced crack nucleation and growth. The relative ratio of these two opposing factors depends on concentration and flow properties, thereby affecting limiting thresholds. The limiting concentration or saturation depends on the relative chemistry of environment and material. A dynamic dislocation model is suggested to account for crack growth.