Boyer says:

If a specimen is subjected to alternating stress over a range insufficient to cause

immediate fracture, gliding may occur within some of the grains, but when the dislocations reach

a grain-boundary they are halted, retracing their movement along the gliding-plane when the

stress is reserved. If the material were ideal, it might be hoped that the dislocations would merely

move to and from along the plane, and that no damage would result. In practice a large number

of cycles can be withstood without apparent damage, but in material as we know it, slight

irregularities will prevent smooth gliding indefinitely, and roughening along the original gliding

plane will make movement difficult, so that gliding will then start on another parallel plane. In

the end, bands of material will have become disorganized and ultimately one of two things must

happen: (1) if the stress range is low, gliding will cease altogether, the only changes still

produced by the alternating stress being elastic, (2) if it exceeds a certain level the gliding will

become so irregular, as to cause separation between the moving surfaces, first locally, producing

gaps, which later will join up into cracks. Thus above the fatigue limit (after a time which is

shorter at high stress ranges), there will be failure below the fatigue limit, the life, in absence of

corrosion, should be indefinitely long as shown above.

In the presence of a corrosive environment the situation will be different. Disorganized

atoms along a gliding-plane may require less activation energy to pass into a liquid than more

perfectly arrayed atoms elsewhere, certainly, while the atoms are in motion along a gliding-

plane, preferential attack may reasonably be expected even below the fatigue limit. This means

that there is no “safe stress range” within which the life should be infinite. It is, however,

convenient to determine endurance limit-namely, the stress range below which the material will

endure some specified number of cycles (the number must be stated).

 It should be note that although stress-corrosion cracking is often intergranular, corrosion

fatigue crack are usually transgranular, following gliding plane inclined at such an angle as to

provide high resolved shear stress. There are exceptions to both rules. Studying corrosion fatigue

cracks on steel found that although mainly transgranular they followed grain boundaries for short

distances, where such boundaries chanced to run in a convenient direction.