Corrosion Monitoring Strategies—Choice Between Area and Point Measurements

There is increasing interest in the use of permanently installed monitoring systems to track the progress of corrosion. There is a choice between point thickness measurement systems, those that monitor the average thickness over a modest area, and large area monitoring systems that will detect relatively severe, localised corrosion. The relative merits of the different types of monitoring system are assessed for cases with different likely fractions of the total surface area affected by corrosion. If the wall loss is expected to be fairly uniform over the component surface then a small number of point sensors is the most attractive solution, whereas if the loss is likely to be highly localised at an unpredictable location and potentially severe, a large area monitoring system is most suitable. In the intermediate case of modest loss over a significant fraction of the surface, the choice is more complex. If the requirement is to detect relatively large wall loss that may be localised then the number of point sensors required increases substantially and the average thickness area monitoring systems appear to be more attractive. However, it is shown that corrosion distributions are frequently exponential, and this can lead to large maximum pit depths when the average wall loss is at the margin of detectability with current commercially available systems.