Statistical Evaluation of Localized Corrosion for Stainless Steels Ranking

An intrinsic stochastic nature features the localized corrosion of stainless steels. The distribution of the breakdown potentials of stainless steels in wide ranges of values in artificial environment or seawater is reviewed. The comparison between statistical distributions of breakdown potentials is proposed as a method to rank stainless steels according to their localized corrosion resistance. This method is implemented with the evaluation of the localized corrosion risk, by comparing distributions of breakdown and corrosion potentials. It is shown that the influence of time in localized corrosion can be taken into account in the ranking, underlining the statistical dependence of the distributions of the breakdown and corrosion potentials on the exposure length.