Thirty-five years in environmentally assisted cracking in Italy: a point of view

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I will attempt to summarize my experience of approximately 35 years on environmental fatigue damage, which I gained from industries outside Milan, Italy, and as a visiting scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. I will present a brief summary of my understanding of the topic of environmentally assisted fatigue of metals. About halfway in my career, I moved from the nuclear industry towards the oil and gas industry. This shift allowed me to understand that environmentally assisted cracking, which is an important topic for pipeline steels, is also similar to the nuclear pressure vessel steel community and that the problems are similar. At the same time, I became aware that the scientific communities are not working well to communicate the issues and challenges. People working in one industrial sector do not seem to appreciate the contribution from another industrial sector. This is understandable, as there are industrial rules and regulations. Because of such constraints, a knowledge gap is introduced into the technical community. This lack of cooperation slows down the progress of relevant research, especially nowadays, when we are facing increasingly complex service situations that may lead to failures. While trying to cope with such difficulties, I became interested in knowledge management. I learned that there is a need to build bridges between contemporary science, engineering, and business. We are facing big challenges in analyzing failures, and maybe it is time to do things differently and consolidate different disciplines of engineering with applications that can give us more reliable predictions. Organizations and companies worldwide are currently facing (a) increasing quantity of available information on material usage, (b) increasing number of people with high education in science and engineering, (c) increasing complexity of the failure problems to be solved, and (d) increasing lack of communication between institutions. It is estimated that the material loss in the US due to corrosion alone is approximately $300 billion per year. The necessity of knowing, understanding, and processing such complex data and problems is a very large task. Thus, there is a need for exploiting the technical information and using communication technology tools to help support teamwork, networking, using available experience and expertise, and, hopefully, international cooperation. Knowledge management involves a cultural change to stimulate a better use of all types of resources. Progress will be slow and difficult if we do not learn how to cope with this new situation.