The pitting corrosion of copper tubes in soft drinking waters is a sporadic problem along the east coast of Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. The lack of an adequate theory for localized soft water copper corrosion has made previous remedial treatment methodologies speculative, and limited by the need for long term field trials. The present authors have recently proposed a new model of the mechanism of pitting corrosion of copper in soft water that show that some current corrosion control strategies may require modification of pH and alkalinity set points to be fully effective. In this work, the authors have used Pourbaix diagrams to determine the optimum pH and alkalinity set points for a soft Australian water known to support copper pitting corrosion.
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