Recreation of Marine Atmospheric Corrosion Condition on Weathering Steel in Laboratory

Salt spray test, autoclave corrosion test, SO2 salt spray test, and Relative humidity test are generally used to assess atmospheric corrosion in laboratories at accelerated rates. However, no test can absolutely simulate the service condition. One can get only approximate corrosion rates using the aforesaid tests which serve as an indicative of corrosion behavior of the material in a service condition. The present work is aimed at creating specific environmental condition in laboratory to get the corrosion test done in short duration to compare with on field exposure test which would otherwise take years to complete. In this work recreation of atmospheric environment of Digha was tried and it was simulated in such a manner that the results of laboratory test could be compared with long time field exposure at Digha. Weathering steel (WS) was taken for experimentations. Potentiostatic electrochemical tests route was adopted to simulate atmospheric condition of Digha. Laboratory test results compared well with 18 month field exposure data in terms of corrosion rate, SEM and Ramon Spectroscopy matching.