Recognizing the Forms of Corrosion

General or Uniform Attack

General or Uniform Attack Uniform corrosion corresponds to the corrosion attack with the
greatest metal weight loss and is a common sight where steel structures are abandoned to rust.
In fact, the rich hues produced by the corrosion of some metals have been put to use in
notable outdoor applications, for example, copper as a long-lasting roofing material and
weathering steel in buildings and sculptures. From a corrosion inspection point of view,
uniform attack is relatively detectable and its effects predictable hence it is deemed to be less
troublesome than other forms of corrosion unless the corroding material is hidden from sight.
The internal corrosion of pipeline, for example, or the corrosion of hidden components and
that of any other buried or immerged structures are good examples that even the simplest
corrosion process needs to be monitored.
Designing in a system a corrosion allowance based on the possible loss of a material thickness
is one of the simplest methods for dealing with uniform attack. Ultrasonic inspection has been
used for decades to measure the thickness of solid objects. A piezoelectric crystal serves as a
transducer to oscillate at high frequencies, coupled directly or indirectly to one surface of the
object whose thickness is to be measured. The time the wave of known velocity takes to travel
through the material is used to determine its thickness. Since the late 1970s, ultrasonic
equipment has been enhanced greatly by combining the basic electronics with computers.
However, many instruments still in use today are for single-point thickness measurements,
which do not provide the capability of the more sophisticated systems.
Rugged instruments based on portable computers are now available from many vendors.
These systems, complete with motordriven robotic devices to manipulate the transducer(s),
have created the ability to measure wall thickness of corroded components at tens of
thousands of points over 0.1 m2, which can be converted into mass loss and pitting rates. This
capability, coupled with increased precision of field measurements achievable with computer-
controlled systems, has made these automated ultrasonic systems well suited for online
corrosion monitoring.
Developments are now being made with individual transducers or transducer arrays that are
left in place to provide continuous monitoring. Permanently attached transducers improve
accuracy by removing errors in relocating a transducer to exactly the same point with exactly
the same couplant thickness. With proper transducer selection, equipment setup, and
controlled temperature conditions, the accuracy of controlled ultrasonic inspection can exceed
±0.025 mm in a laboratory setting. Field inspections are typically to within ±0.1 mm.
Uncoated components having a smooth external surface after cleaning off any biomass or
debris can be inspected for internal corrosion or erosion wall losses with the traditional single
backwall echo approach. Through-coating measurements allow coated systems to be
inspected without removal of the coating after applying echo-to-echo technique and A-scan
imaging provided the coating is well-bonded to the metal surface and its thickness less than 6
mm.
The thickness of the metal substrate is determined simply by the time of flight for the
ultrasonic signal to reach the back surface and return to the transducer measured using either
signal T2 or T3. Ultrasonic testing (UT) digital gauges with 4- to 5-MHz, dual-element
transducers are able to inspect carbon steel or austenitic stainless steel for walls thicker than 1
mm. Dualelement transducers can focus the ultrasonic beam at a specific depth range thus
enabling optimum sensitivity on corroded, eroded, or irregular internal riser surfaces. These
transducers are highly sensitive to small pits in their optimum thickness range.

Localized Corrosion
Probably the most common type of localized corrosion is pitting, in which small volumes of
metal are removed by corrosion from certain areas on the surface to produce craters or pits
that may culminate in complete perforation of a pipe or vessel wall. Pitting corrosion may
occur on a metal surface in a stagnant or slow-moving liquid. It may also be the first step in
crevice corrosion, poultice corrosion, and many of the corrosion cells.
Pitting is considered to be more dangerous than uniform corrosion damage because it is more
difficult to detect, predict, and design against. A small, narrow pit with minimal overall metal
loss can lead to the failure of an entire engineering system. Only a small amount of metal is
corroded, but perforations can lead to costly repair of expensive equipment.
One spectacular catastrophe resulting from a single pit has been described in the television
series called Seconds from Disaster. The sewer explosion that killed 215 people in
Guadalajara, Mexico, in April 1992, also caused a series of blasts that damaged 1600
buildings and injured 1500 people. At least nine separate explosions were heard, starting at
approximately 10:30 a.m., ripping a jagged trench that ran almost 2 km. The trench was
contiguous with the city sewer system and the open holes at least 6 m deep and 3 m across. In
several locations, much larger craters of 50 m in diameter were evident with numerous
vehicles buried or toppled into them. An eyewitness said that a bus was “swallowed up by the
hole.” Damage costs were estimated at 75 million U.S. dollars.
The sewer explosion was traced to the installation of a water pipe by a contractor several
years before the explosion. This water pipe leaked water on a gasoline line lying underneath.
The cathodically protected gasoline pipeline had a hole within a cavity and an eroded area, all
in a longitudinal direction. A second hole did not perforate the internal wall. The galvanized
water pipe obviously had suffered stray current corrosion effects which were visible in pits of
different sizes. The subsequent corrosion of the gasoline pipeline, in turn, caused leakage of
gasoline into a main sewer line.
Pitting cavities may fill with corrosion products and form caps over the pit cavities sometimes
creating nodules or tubercles. While the shapes of pits vary widely they are usually roughly
saucer-shaped, conical, or hemispherical for steel and many associated alloys. The following
are some factors contributing to initiation and propagation of pitting corrosion:
• Localized chemical or mechanical damage to a protective oxide film
• Water chemistry factors that can cause breakdown of a passive film such as acidity, low
dissolved oxygen concentrations which tend to render a protective oxide film less stable and
high chloride concentrations
• Localized damage to or poor application of a protective coating
• The presence of nonuniformities in the metal structure of the component, for example,
nonmetallic inclusions.
The complex interactions between these factors may cause major differences on how pitting
corrosion will initiate and develop in real situations. Copper, for example, a relatively simple
material in terms of its metallurgy, can suffer three well-documented types of pitting
corrosion depending on specific conditions in the water it carries:
Type I pitting is associated with hard or moderately hard waters with a pH between 7 and 7.8,
and it is most likely to occur in cold water. The pitting is deep and narrow, and results in pipe
failure.
Type II pitting occurs only in certain soft waters, with a pH below 7.2 and occurs rarely in
temperatures below 60°C. The pitting that occurs is narrower than Type I, but still may result
in pipe failure.
Type III pitting occurs in cold soft waters having a pH above 8.0. It is a more generalized
form of pitting, which tends to be wide and shallow and results in blue water, byproduct
releases, or pipe blockage.
The practical importance of pitting corrosion depends on the thickness of the metal and on the
penetration rate. In general, the rate of penetration decreases if the number of pits increases.
This is because adjacent pits have to share the available adjacent cathodic area, which controls
the corrosion current that can flow. A pit may go through four separate stages: (1) initiation,
(2) propagation, (3) termination, and (4) reinitiation.
Typically, a local cell will lead to the initiation of a pit due to the presence of an abnormal
anodic site surrounded by normal surface which acts as a cathode, or by the presence of an
abnormal cathodic site surrounded by a normal surface in which a pit will have disappeared
due to corrosion. In the second case, postexamination should reveal the local cathode, since it
will remain unattacked. Most cases of pitting are believed to be caused by local cathodic sites
in an otherwise normal surface.
In the propagation stage, the rate increases due to changes in the anodic and cathodic
environment which become respectively more acidic and alkaline. A pit may terminate due to
increased internal resistance of the local cell caused by either filling with corrosion products,
filming of the cathode, and so forth. If a pitted surface is dried out, pitting corrosion will be
stifled, at least temporarily. When rewetted, some of the pits may reinitiate. Movement of the
solution over a metal surface often reduces and may even prevent pitting that otherwise would
occur if the liquid was stagnant.
As mentioned earlier, pitting is often associated with other forms of corrosion. Intergranular
corrosion and cracks, for example, may progress from the main pit cavity further into the
metal. Pitting at the edge of an aluminum-lithium sheet has progressed as intergranular
corrosion at the root of the pits. In other cases intergranular corrosion is the precursor to the
formation of cavernous pits. And crevice corrosion described later can be considered to be an
aggravated case of pitting corrosion. Stray current corrosion that occurs when an electric
current leaves a metal surface and flows into the environment can cause a very characteristic
form of macroscopic pits.