Adsorption, embrittlement and stress-corrosion cracking

For more than thirty years there has been speculation concerning the possible role of adsorbed, surface-active species in certain embrittlement† phenomena (Rebinder 1931, Orowan 1933, Uhlig 1959, Coleman et al. 1961, Westwood and Kamdar 1963, Nichols and Rostoker 1963). However, experimental evidence associating embrittlement with adsorption has been lacking. This note describes the results of some experiments with polycrystalline silver chloride which appear to provide such evidence, and which support the view that several environmentally-induced embrittlement phenomena may possess an essentially similar mechanism.