ABSTRACT
The study of the long-term corrosion of iron is relevant in several fi elds of application. First, in the context of the preservation of cultural heritage, it is of importance to understand the corrosion of archaeological remains in order to diagnose their alteration state and to apply suitable treatments or storage conditions. Moreover, other more unusual domains of civil engineering are concerned by this issue. This is the case, for instance in the domain of nuclear waste management. Actually, in several countries including France it is envisaged to store or to dispose the radioactive
wastes in steel canisters in several environments, depending on their radioactivity level (e.g. soils, concrete, atmospheric environments, etc.). As the surrounding system has to be effi cient for a period of time varying between several hundred to thousands of years, one needs to understand the corrosion behaviour of the steel materials (Clanfi eld et al., 2008). To this purpose, archaeological artefacts are studied because they provide long-term data that cannot be obtained on the basis of laboratory experiments.
