Local Electrochemical Methods Adapted to Studying Environment–Microstructure–Mechanics Couplings

Throughout this book, it has been clearly shown that a better understanding of the coupling phenomena between the mechanics and the reactivity of a material should involve the use of new analysis techniques. Many of them have permitted shedding new light concerning the problems addressed. In particular it has been shown that it is necessary to analyze the process at an increasingly finer scale in order to best understand the phenomena's heterogeneity. Indeed, corrosion mechanisms rarely result from uniform and homogeneous processes, making their modeling difficult. Furthermore, the addition of mechanical stress leads, in most cases, to locating the material's vulnerability. This is why it has been important for us, in this chapter, to develop some techniques which are used or usable for analyzing the influence of mechanics on metallic materials' reactivity. For this, we introduce some localized in situ measurement techniques explaining the measurement principle, their applications as well as their limitations.