“…The important factors that affect the integrity of the protective oxide scale are growth stresses that develop within the scale, intrinsic to the oxidation process, and also the residual stresses that result after cooling to room temperature from the differences in thermal expansion between the metal substrate and the oxide (Tolpygo and Clarke, 1999). For this reason, much effort has been put forth in the past years to characterize the evolution of growth stresses in oxide scales during oxidation (Schumann et al , 2000; Messaoudi et al , 2000; Mennicke et al , 2001; Clarke, 2002; Eschler et al , 2004; Huntz et al , 2007). In the specific case of Al 2 O 3 forming alloys, recent studies have focused on the in situ determination of growth stresses during high-temperature oxidation (above 1000 °C) of Ni-Al and Fe-Cr-Al alloys using synchrotron radiation (Specht et al , 2004; Veal et al , 2006; Reddy et al , 2007; Veal and Paulikas, 2008).…”