The empirical prediction of weight change and corrosion rate of low-carbon steel

Understanding the corrosion rate of metallic building materials is very important to maximize their beneficial use of public facilities. Direct measurements of the weight change and corrosion rate would be time consuming and expensive. This study aims to develop new empirical models based on the experimental data of testing 25 specimens immersed in five different environments for predicting the weight change and corrosion rate of the low-carbon steel. Using the equation developed based on the correlation between corrosion rate and chloride ion concentration is able to predict the corrosion rate of low-carbon steel at the limited chloride ion concentration. An increase in the trend lines of plotting the modeled and measured weight change of low-carbon steel versus immersion time is very similar to each other and progressively increase with increasing of the NaCl concentration. The corrosion rate of low-carbon steel increases from 0.202 to 0.286 mm/y with increasing of the NaCl concentration from 0 to 5% (w/w) in aqueous solution. The weight change and corrosion rate of the steel material are predicted using the new empirical models to contribute to the most reliable applications of low-carbon steel building materials in the future.