Crazing

What Does Crazing Mean?

Crazing refers to a network of visual cracks on a coated metallic surface. It occurs due to tension stresses in some glassy thermoplastic polymers.

Crazing is propagated in metallic surface regions that experience high tension and leads to the formation of microvoids and small cracks. If an applied tensile stress is sufficient then these cracks elongate and break, causing the microvoids to grow and expand. Crazing has no influence on corrosion resistance.

Crazing may also be known as shallow map cracking and pattern cracking.

Corrosionpedia Explains Crazing

Crazing forms at significantly stressed regions associated with scratches and molecular inhomogeneities.

Industrially, crazing is considered a glaze defect due to the metal being significantly weaker than an uncrazed metal of the same type. In polymers, a craze is different from a crack because it can't be felt on the surface and it doesn't affect the structural integrity of a material – allowing it to still successfully support a load.