Catastrophic brittle failure of a normally ductile metal when in contact with a liquid metal and subsequently stressed in tension.

(1) An isothermal reversible reaction in which a solid solution is converted into two or more intimately mixed solids on cooling, the number of solids formed being the same as the number of components in the system. (2) An alloy having the composition ind ...

A surface-active agent; usually an organic compound whose moleculei contain a hydrophilic group at one end and a lipophilic group at the other.

A form of high-temperature corrosion of chromium-bearing alloys in which green chromium oxide (Cr2O3) forms, but certain other alloy constituents remain metallic; some simultaneous carburization is sometimes observed.

A term used in the automotive industry to describe the corrosion of vehicle body parts due to the collection of road salts and debris on ledges and in pockets that are kept moist by weather and washing. Also called deposit corrosion or attack.

The reversible interchange of ions between a liquid and solid, with no substantial structural changes in the solid.

An individual crystal in a polycrystalline metal or alloy; it may or may not contain twinned regions and subgrains; a portion of a solid metal (usually a fraction of an inch in size), in which the atoms are arranged in an orderly pattern.

A nonpolarizable electrode with a known and highly reproducible potential used for potentiometric and voltammetric analyses. See also calomel electrode.

An experimental technique for evaluating susceptibility to stress-corrosion cracking. It involves pulling the specimen to failure in uniaxial tension at a controlled slow strain rate while the specimen is in the test environment and examining the specimen ...

A fatigue fracture feature, often observed in electron micrographs, that indicates the position of the crack front after each succeeding cycle of stress. The distance between striations indicates the advance of the crack front across that crystal during o ...

Visible at magnifications above 25x.

A hard, brittle, nonmagnetic intermediate phase with a tetragonal crystal structure, containing 30 atoms per unit cell, space group P42mnm, occurring in many binary and ternary alloys of the transition elements. The composition of this phase in the variou ...

Corrosion at discrete sites, stress-corrosion cracking.

See transgranular cracking.

One mole is the mass numerically equal (in grams) to the relative molecular mass of a substance. It is the amount of substance of a system that contains as many elementary units (6.023 exp23) as there are atoms of carbon in 0.012 kg of the pure nuclide C1 ...

A device for measuring temperatures, consisting of lengths of two dissimilar metals or alloys that are electrically joined at one end and connected to a voltage-measuring instrument at the other end. When one junction is hotter than the other, a thermal e ...

A generic term for measures of resistance to extension of a crack. The term is sometimes restricted to results of fracture mechanics tests, which are directly applicable in fracture control. However, the term commonly includes results from simple tests of ...

An accumulation of deposits. This term includes accumulation and growth of marine organisms on a submerged metal surface and also includes the accumulation of deposits (usually inorganic) on heat exchanger tubing.

Glosary corrosion

Brittie fracture of a normally ductile material in which the corrosive effect of the environment is a causative factor. Environmental cracking is a general term that includes corrosion fatigue, high-temperature hydrogen attack, hydrogen blistering, hydrog ...