Failure by stress corrosion of bundles of fibres

Bundles of fibres loaded from their ends and immersed in a corrosive environment show times to failure that are extremely sensitive to the value of the applied load. This behaviour is accounted for by using the empirically established relation between rate of crack growth (v) and stress intensity factor (K$_1$) found for many brittle materials (v $\propto$ K$^n_1$) and by using a two-parameter Weibull distribution for the initial lengths of the cracks in the fibres. The theory accounts well for the time to failure of the bundle and for the rate of failure of individual filaments during stress corrosion. The dominant feature of the results is that time to failure depends on applied load to the power -n.