Effect of Ripple Load on Stress-Corrosion Cracking in Structural Steels

The presence of small ripple loading can, under certain circumstances, significantly reduce time-to-failure and threshold stress intensity for stress-corrosion cracking (SCC) of steels. A predictive framework for such ripple-loading effects (RLE) is developed from concepts and descriptors used in SCC and corrosion fatigue characterization. The proposed framework is capable of defining critical conditions required for the occurrence of RLE and predicting the time-to-failure curves. The agreement between the predicted and laboratory data is excellent.