ABSTRACT

Twentieth century beginning witnessed the rapid emergence of steel and iron pipe transportation in process industries. At the same time, potable water reticulation metallic pipe has been at least around 100 years old and fully-grown up. There is a possible threat of stray current posing to metallic materials and structures in daily reality as well. Either salty, aqueous environments or the backfill soil in vicinity of distribution conduits usually encompasses oxygen, moisture content and is inadequately resistive to permit passage of electrical current; under these circumstances, buried steel structures are subject to corrosion. As a result, these decaying infrastructures are raising concern to consumers, producers, legislators and regulators. Severely external corrosion problem is one of the most considerable interest, often attributed to the corrosiveness of the aggressive surrounding environment, particularly saline soil, commonly in coastal areas. Taking advantage of electrolytic corrosion, an artificial system was adopted to intimate potentially hostile environment to closely scrutinize corrosion behavior of steel pipes, enabling us to estimate the effect of some important factors such as degradation rate, inspected areas under similar exposure conditions. Some of these parameters are readily available in corrosion databanks after investigating experimentally 82 relatively identical specimens yielded from corrosion tests.