The failure of an armour faced conveyor connector

Abstract The combined use of modern metallurgical techniques for fracture examination, laboratory test data and fracture mechanics calculations allows metallurgical failures to be examined in a quantitative manner. Complex load histories and environments can result in more than one sub‐critical cracking mechanism occurring in a component. Quantitative understanding of the rate determining cracking process is a necessary prerequisite to rectifying the problem. The following case study describes a connector from an armour faced conveyor which failed in service. The failure investigation involved fractography, stress analysis, material property evaluation and fracture mechanics calculations. Fractographic evidence indicated a stress corrosion failure mechanism. Calculations of critical crack sizes showed that stress corrosion cracking alone could not account for the fracture. It was concluded that the failure was due to a sequence of three cracking processes which preceded unstable ductile fracture. Firstly, frictional heating caused rubbing or quench cracks typically 0.5–1 mm deep. Secondly, corrosion fatigue cracks grew several millimetres allowing the third fracture process, stress corrosion cracking, (SCC) to initiate and grow. In the situation described here, this process was much faster than corrosion fatigue. The influence of defect size due to rubbing cracks and the influence of K_ISCC have been compared with the corrosion fatigue life of the component. An increase in K_ISCC and hence critical defect size for SCC has been shown to increase the corrosion fatigue life of the component by a large factor. A change in design would also alleviate the problem of SCC by reducing the static stress, which is the driving force for SCC.