Detection of SCC of 304 NG stainless steel in an acidic NaCl solution using electrochemical noise based on chaos and wavelet analysis

Abstract

The stress corrosion crack (SCC) of 304 nuclear grade (NG) stainless steel (SS) in 0.5 mol/L NaCl+1.5 mol/L H₂SO₄ was monitored using electrochemical noise (EN) based on chaos theory, statistics and wavelet analysis. The results indicated that the SCC process was divided into three stages according to the transient features in the EN. In the beginning, compared with the sample without applied stress, the enhanced fluctuation amplitude in the electrochemical current noise (ECN) of the stressed samples was attributed to stress-enhanced pitting corrosion and uniform corrosion; then the fluctuations of ECN for all the samples decreased due to a coverage by the corrosion products; however, the ECN fluctuations of stressed sample were larger than the unstressed sample, suggesting that the stress enhanced the SCC initiation and propagation. Chaos analysis revealed that the correlation dimensions increase from 2.1 to 2.5 during the corrosion process, and the applied stress seems increase the complexity and uncertainty of the ECN signal.