The environmental performance of 316L grade stainless steel, in the form of tensile specimens containing a single corrosion pit with various aspect ratios, under cyclic loading in aerated chloride solutions is investigated in this study. Results from environmental tests were compared and contrasted with those obtained using finite element analysis (FEA). Fractography of the failed specimens obtained from experiments revealed that fatigue crack initiation took place at the base of the shallow pit. The crack initiation shifted towards the shoulder and the mouth of the pit for pits of increasing depth. This process is well predicted by FEA, as the strain contour maps show that strain is the highest around the centric strip of the pit. However, for shallow pits, local strain is uniformly distributed around that strip but begins to concentrate more towards the shoulder and the mouth region for increasingly deep pits.

Two types of loading protocol, i.e., monotonic loading and cyclic loading, were compared to investigate the effect on the mechanical properties of 316L stainless steel. The specimen used is a dog-bone specimen in accordance with ASTM E8 and ASTM E606 standard. For cyclic loading, the multiple-step method is used to obtain the hysteresis loop of the material. A total of 13 strain amplitude conditions had been carried out, ranging from 0.05%-0.65%. The stress-strain curve shows that the cyclic stress-strain curve is higher than the monotonic stress-strain curve due to the cyclic hardening behaviour in the 316L stainless steel. The cyclic hardening behaviour increases the ultimate tensile stress of the material. However, when the material gains its strength through cyclic hardening, the ductility in the material will decrease.