In-Situ Monitoring and Analysis of the Pitting Corrosion of Carbon Steel by Acoustic Emission

The acoustic emission (AE) technique was applied to monitor the pitting corrosion of carbon steel in NaHCO3 + NaCl solutions. The open circuit potential (OCP) measurement and corrosion morphology in-situ capturing using an optical microscope were conducted during AE monitoring. The corrosion micromorphology was characterized with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The propagation behavior and AE features of natural pitting on carbon steel were investigated. After completion of the signal processing, including pre-treatment, shape preserving interpolation, and denoising, for raw AE waveforms, three types of AE signals were classified in the correlation diagrams of the new waveform parameters. Finally, a 2D pattern recognition method was established to calculate the similarity of different continuous AE graphics, which is quite effective to distinguish the localized corrosion from uniform corrosion.