Prediction of long-term corrosion and mechanical behaviors of steel in seawater by an electrochemically accelerated aging technique

Conventional corrosion testing is a time-consuming and expensive process because it requires months or years of exposure for reliable results. Thus, it is necessary to develop a simple, fast, and accurate corrosion testing method for predicting the long-term corrosion behavior of materials. In this article, the corrosion behavior of a steel specimen equivalent to that of the same specimen exposed to seawater for 90 days was reproduced in a short time (24 h) using an electrochemically accelerated aging technique. The results indicated that the short-term accelerated aging test yields good qualitative and quantitative agreement with a long-term immersion test in terms of weight loss, corrosion product, and type of corrosion. Furthermore, based on the experimental results, it was possible to predict the long-term mechanical behavior of the corroded structure. The tensile and yield strengths of structural steel submerged in seawater for 60 years were decreased by 1/3 and 1/4 of the initial strengths, respectively.