Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of a population of surface flaws on the failure time of glass under static loading and subject to stress corrosion. The presence of cracks modifies the stress field within the material and they induce a shielding of the stress at the crack tips hence increasing the lifetime of the material. We show that this effect becomes important when the length of the cracks is comparable with the distance separating them. Moreover, in the limit of small cracks, we have developed a model to estimate the lifetime of the material.