The damage to materials caused by corrosive wear is a complicated surface failure process that involves both the wear-accelerated corrosion and corrosion-accelerated mechanical failure. This synergistic attack that plagues many industrial facilities can cause severe material loss (e.g. erosion-corrosion of tailing pipes for slurry transfer). Although efforts have been made to resist corrosive wear, the success has been limited due to limited understanding of the wear-corrosion synergy. In order to understand this synergism, it is essential to determine the contributions of individual components (wear, corrosion, additional wear due to corrosion, and additional corrosion due to wear) to the total material loss.
Researchers at the University of Alberta have developed an analysis system that measures the rates of material losses caused by the above-mentioned four components. The technology is a fast and quantitative tool for determining simultaneous contributions of these individual components to total material loss during a corrosive wear process.