Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) failure in marine areas of fixed guards for climbing

This work studies the particular mechanism of environmental stress corrosion cracking (SCC) that has been described to interest stainless steel products, like climbing anchors, installed in sea areas. The failure analysis of several broken anchors was carried out. The samples were collected in different parts of the world, always from climbing structures close to the sea. The analysis confirmed the stress corrosion mechanism of degradation, giving also important information about the specific environments causing the metal fracture. These results are in agreement with a few previous works about this subject and are in the frame of the larger topic of SCC of austenitic stainless steel at room temperature. Moreover, some corrosion tests were carried out on stainless steel samples simulating the operation conditions, after contamination with electrolytes at different concentration. The tests are performed in order to better understand the degradation mechanism and to evaluate the influence of some environmental parameters over the susceptibility to SCC. With these experimental data, a possible interpretation model has been proposed together with some reasonable solutions for the material selection process, considering the problem’s characteristics and the multiple alternatives available nowadays for climbing materials.