The damage and fracture of materials are technologically of enormous interest due to their economic and human cost. They cover a wide range of phenomena like e.g. cracking of glass, aging of concrete, the failure of fiber networks in the formation of paper and the breaking of a metal bar subject to an external load. Failure of composite systems is of utmost importance in naval, aeronautics and ...

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) of metals is an issue of major concern in engineering since this phenomenon causes many catastrophic failures of structural components in aggressive environments. SCC is even more harmful under cathodic conditions promoting the phenomenon known as hydrogen assisted cracking (HAC), hydrogen assisted fracture (HAF) or hydrogen embrittlement (HE). A common way to as...

The causes and the prevention of carbon steel corrosion in amine systems are reviewed. The corrosive agents are acid gases, oxygen, heat stable salts, amine degradation products, and, in refineries, gas contaminants such as ammonia and hydrogen cyanide. Corrosion mechanisms are provided for carbon steel exposed to amine solutions and for amine regenerator overhead systems containing aqueous con...

The stress corrosion cracking (SCC) of stainless steel is one of the biggest problems for maintaining atomic power and chemical plants. However the mechanism has not been solved because of difficulty in observing hydrogen movement. In order to solve this problem, the author has developed a new SCC test method that enables the super Kelvin force microscope (SKFM) and the Kelvin force microscope ...

The motivation of the study is the development of a coupled approach able to account for the interaction between environment and plasticity in a polycrystalline material. The paper recalls first the constitutive equations used to describe the behaviour of the grain core and of the grain boundary (GB). The procedure that is applied to generate synthetic polycrystalline aggregates with an explici...