Modelling of marine immersion corrosion for copper-bearing steels

The non-linear phenomenological model previously proposed for the ‘general’ corrosion loss of mild and low alloy steels under fully aerated ‘at-sea’ near-surface immersion conditions is applied to provide a new interpretation of literature data for copper-bearing steels. The data is examined to extract the parameters required for the model as a function of average seawater temperature. On the basis of the expectation of consistency, the data is then used to calibrate the parameters. All are generally consistent with the parameters derived earlier for mild and low alloy steels. The calibrated parameters are used to predict a consolidated plot of expected corrosion loss–time–temperature for copper-bearing steels. This compares favourably with a similar plot derived earlier from observed data alone.