ABSTRACT
Steel is by far the most commonly used metal employed for construction, and a good deal of that construction finds its way into the sea which covers about 80% of the planet’s surface. Rather, since it has always been well known that seawater rusts steel, the relevant lines of research have been directed at technologies to protect steel, or else at finding alternative alloys that resist marine corrosion. Electrochemistry is often regarded as a slightly weird subject, described using obscure words and symbols, many of which have their origins in ancient Greek. When steel is corroding in seawater, the situation is usually highly dynamic, with individual locations, separated by submicroscopic distances: sometimes being anodic in character, and sometimes cathodic. Corrosion rates are usually expressed in units relevant to engineering structures, such as mm/year. However, the existence of corrosion cells opens up an alternative electrochemical way of measuring corrosion.
