Issue 50

N. Alexopoulos et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 50 (2019) 342-353; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.50.29 342 Focused on the research activities of the Greek Society of Experimental Mechanics of Materials Simulation of the corrosion-induced damage on aluminum alloy 2024 specimens with equivalent surface notches Nikolaos D. Alexopoulos, Nikoleta Siskou, Christina-Margarita Charalampidou University of the Aegean, School of Engineering, Department of Financial and Management Engineering, 41 Kountouriotι str, 82132, Chios, Greece nalexop@aegean.gr , http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7851-1845 Stavros K. Kourkoulis National Technical University of Athens, Department of Mechanics, Laboratory for Testing and Materials, Theocaris Building, 5 Heroes of Polytechnion Avenue, 157 73, Athens, Greece A BSTRACT . The effect of corrosion environment aggressiveness on the tensile mechanical properties degradation of AA2024-T3 was investigated. Tensile specimens were pre-corroded for various exposure times to different corrosive solutions, i.e., exfoliation corrosion (EXCO) and 3.5 wt. % NaCl. Then they were tested mechanically. In non-corroded specimens, surface notches of vari- ous depths were machined to simulate the degradation of the tensile mechanical properties due to the presence of artificial surface defects. A mechanical model was developed to correlate the corrosion-induced tensile ductility degradation due to pitting and possible hydrogen embrittlement with the equivalent artifici- ally induced surface notches. The cases studied for this physical correlation were: a) EXCO exposure with artificial notches, b) EXCO with 3.5 wt.% NaCl exposure and c) 3.5 wt.% NaCl exposure with artificial notches. Higher correla- tion was noticed for short exposure times for all cases where the dominant de- gradation mechanism is slight pitting formation. It was found that 1 h EXCO exposure is equivalent to 92 h exposure to NaCl solution regarding the tensile ductility degradation while 24 h EXCO exposure has the same effect on duc- tility decrease with a 240 μm surface notch or 4000 h exposure to NaCl solution. K EYWORDS . Corrosion; Notches; Mechanical properties; Aluminum alloy. Citation: Alexopoulos, N.D., Siskou, N., Cha- ralampidou, C.M., Kourkoulis, S.K., Simulation of the corrosion-induced damage on aluminum alloy 2024 specimens with equivalent surface notches, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 50 (2019) 342-353. Received: 25.01.2019 Accepted: 27.05.2019 Published: 01.10.2019 Copyright: © 2019 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. I NTRODUCTION uring the last decades attention has been paid by the aviation industries to the reduction of aircrafts maintenance costs. Damage tolerance evaluation for the skin and the fuselage of the aircraft is of major importance for the decrease of the inspection intervals and therefore of the respective maintenance costs. Among the greatest D