A thermodynamically consistent modelling of stress corrosion tests in elasto-viscoplastic materials

•A damage model for uniaxial tests in austenitic steels in acid solutions is proposed.•It accounts for influence of the strain rate as well as of the pH on specimen strength.•Local concepts of stress and strain are not used in the failure analysis.•The material constants are easily identified from standard experiments.•The thermodynamic consistency of this global approach is discussed in detail.

Slow strain rate (SSR) and constant load (CL) tests are the most important techniques used to rank the susceptibility of different materials to stress corrosion cracking in a specific environment. The present paper proposes a thermodynamically consistent phenomenological framework to model both SSR and CL tests of austenitic steels in acid solutions at room temperature. This global one-dimensional approach does not require the computation of local stresses or strains. The goal is to discuss the thermodynamic aspects that allow proposing a one-dimensional model that combine mathematical simplicity with the capability of describing a complex non-linear mechanical behaviour.