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Received: June 14, 2017; Revised: June 14, 2017; Accepted: July 26, 2017
Abstract: Stress-corrosion cracking (SCC) of alloy 600 and alloy 800 in 0.5 mol/L thiosulfate solution during constant strain was investigated using electrochemical noise (EN) combined with 3-D microscope techniques. The in-situ morphology observation and EN results indicate that the SCC process could be divided into three stages: (1) passive film stabilization and growth, (2) crack initiation, (3) and crack growth. Power Spectral Density (PSD) and the probability distribution obtained from EN were used as the “fingerprint” to distinguish the different processes. During passive film stabilization and growth, the current noise signals resembled “white noise”: when the crack initiated, many transient peaks could be seen in the current noise and the wavelet energy at low frequency as well as the noise resistance decreased. After crack propagation, the noise amplitudes increased, particularly the white noises at low and high frequencies (WL and WH) in the PSDs. Finally, the detection of metal structure corrosion in a simulated sea splash zone and pipeline corrosion in the atmosphere are established.