Methods to Evaluate Corrosion in Buried Steel Structures: A Review

Around the world, there are thousands of metal structures completely or partially buried in the soil. The main concern in their design is corrosion. Corrosion is a mechanism that degrades materials and causes structural failures in infrastructures, which can lead to severe effects on the environment and have direct impact on the population health. In addition, corrosion is extremely complex in the underground environment due to the variability of the local conditions. The problem is that there are many methods to its evaluation but none have been clearly established. In order to ensure the useful life of such structures, engineers usually consider an excess thickness that increases the economic cost of manufacturing and does not satisfy the principles of efficiency in the use of resources. In this paper, an extended revision of the existing methods to evaluate corrosion is carried out to optimize the design of buried steel structures according to their service life. Thus, they are classified into two categories depending on the information they provide: qualitative and quantitative methods. As a result, it is concluded that the most exhaustive methodologies for estimating soil corrosion are quantitative methods fed by non-electrochemical data based on experimental studies that measure the mass loss of structures.