Pitting corrosion as a stochastic process

Abstract

WE believe that a stochastic theory originally developed to explain the fracture of solid materials under stress can be used to explain pitting corrosion. In the past (see ref. 1), both pitting potential² and induction time³ have been used to select resistant alloys and to search for possible breakdown mechanisms. Studies of these and other phenomena, however, always reveal a wide scatter of data, so we have used the stochastic approach, which has proved useful in understanding time-dependent phenomena (see refs 4 and 5).