Applied Stress Affecting the Environmentally Assisted Cracking

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) is affected by the mode of applied stress, i.e., tension, compression, or torsion. The cracking is measured in terms of initiation time to nucleate a crack or time to failure. In a simple uniaxial loading under tension or compression, it is observed that the initiation time can vary in orders of magnitude depending on the alloy and the environment. Fracture can be intergranular or transgranular or mixed mode. Factors that affect SCC are solubility of the metal into surrounding chemical solution, and diffusion rate (like hydrogen into a tensile region) of an aggressive element into the metal and liquid metallic elements in the grain boundaries. Strain hardening exponent that affects the local internal stresses and their gradients can affect the diffusion kinetics. We examine two environments (Ga and 3.5 pct NaCl) for the same alloy 7075-T651, under constant uniaxial tension and compression load. These two cases provide us application to two different governing mechanisms namely liquid metal embrittlement (7075-Ga) and hydrogen-assisted cracking (7075-NaCl). We note that, in spite of the differences in their mechanisms, both systems show similar behavior in the applied K vs crack initiation time plots. One common theme among them is the transport mechanism of a solute element to a tensile-stress region to initiate fracture.