Monitoring of crevice corrosion with the electrochemical frequency modulation technique

In this work, it is investigated whether electrochemical frequency modulation can be used to monitor crevice corrosion. With this novel technique. a potential signal consisting of two sine waves of different frequencies is applied to a corroding system. As a corroding system is non-linear in nature, the ac-response will contain non-linear components at harmonic and intermodulation frequencies. Analysis of these components can give information about the corrosion behavior of the system under investigation like the uniform corrosion rate. Crevice corrosion has been investigated by measuring the so-called causality factors, which are calculated from the ratio of the current components in the ac-response. According to ASTM standard G48, crevice corrosion has been investigated under the rubber band and cylindrical TFE-fluorocarbon block. Tests were also conducted by creating crevice between circular boundary of metallic sample and epoxy in which metal is engraved. Thus, three patterns of crevice corrosion have been used to see the response of causality factors for AISI 304. Besides some simulations with a simple mathematical model, experiments with artificial crevices were carried out in chloride containing water. The results show that in most cases these causality factors do change when the system goes from uniform corrosion to crevice corrosion. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.