The Interplay of Fundamental Understanding, Sophisticated Experiments and Plant Response to the Prediction of SCC in High Temperature Water

Stress corrosion cracking results from complex interactions among 20+
parameters that are often distilled into simple categories related to
stress, environment and microstructure. The interactions are not
independent, but rather the effect of one variable on SCC is often
strongly dependent on every other variable. Thus, a design-of-experiments
approach is inadequate since it requires millions of data.

A further complexity exists in challenging environments like high temperature, high
pressure water, which make direct measurements of SCC as well as many key
parameters such as corrosion potential more difficult. Our understanding
of passivity and SCC in the vicinity of room temperature does not directly
apply to high temperature water, and our intuition and hypotheses require
careful evaluation using critical experiments.

This talk presents the development of a multifaceted approach to
predicting SCC based on a combination of sophisticated experimental
measurements, development and critical testing of fundamental hypotheses,
and evaluation against well-characaterized plant data.