Use of Electrochemical Techniques in Measuring Corrosion in the Laboratory and Monitoring Corrosion in the Field

摘要

Most corrosion mechanisms are electrochemical in nature. Therefore, electrochemical techniques are widely used to understand corrosion in many corrosion education institutes and research organizations. Electrochemical techniques are also used in plant monitoring of corrosion mainly because of their ability to produce instantaneous corrosion rates. This paper presents the status of application of electrochemical techniques for measuring corrosion in the laboratory and for monitoring corrosion in the field. The information presented in the paper was collected based on a survey of corrosion professionals from education institutes, from research organizations, and from those working in the field. The salient features of the survey include: a large percentage of professionals are not following any standard procedures in conducting corrosion tests using electrochemical techniques; a fairly large percentage of field personnel are not aware of procedures used to calculate general corrosion rates (this practice prevails because many field-deployable devices have inbuilt general corrosion rate calculators); almost 50 % of these professionals do not evaluate localized corrosion (because localized corrosion may lead to catastrophic failures in the field, 80 % of field operators evaluate the susceptibility of materials to localized corrosion); the involvement of education professionals in field corrosion rate monitoring is very limited (given the safety and security procedures to be followed in the field, the lesser involvement of academic community in the field is understandable; however, the establishment of paths for exposing students in the field will be useful in the long run); and the knowledge transfer cycle is broken at the field operator to educationists step (consequently, field use of electrochemical techniques is not taught during education). The findings of the survey should be considered within the limitations of it. A major limitation of the survey is that it summarized responses of only 55 professionals.