The incremental self-consistent scheme applied to active stress corrosion cracks

The incremental self-consistent scheme is used to determine the changes of the effective elastic properties of a solid containing many stress corrosion growing cracks. Taking into account interactions between cracks, the most suitable representative parameters are determined from experimental distribution of cracks obtained with slow strain-rate corrosion tests. We showed that crack propagation is not a stochastic process, increase or decrease of crack velocity being due to interactions between cracks. The interactions between cracks are well taken into account by the “active crack” since it characterises the collective behaviour of growing cracks. The comparison between simulated curves and experimental data shows that the active crack accurately describes the overall behaviour taking into account the individual contribution of each crack.