Corrosion
Corrosion is one of the degradation mechanisms in many structural metals. Among
various aspects of corrosion, pitting corrosion is a complex process
and is very common in aluminum and steel alloys. A fundamental aspect
of pitting corrosion failure mechanisms is that they tend to initiate
at the micro/nano-structure level. The details of the mechanisms vary
with material composition, electrolyte and other environmental
conditions. An improved understanding of the evolution of the chemical
elements degradation during the corrosion process would be of practical
importance in designing improved structural metals to better suit
specific environmental conditions. The current materials development
technology does not take into account chemical element analysis during
degradation, which might be useful to understand and evaluate
structural integrity. Currently, we are investigating the chemical
elements degradation during the corrosion process through modeling and
simulations combined with controlled experiments. Specifically, we are
investigating the critical parameters/rules at multiple levels through
controlled experiments with microscopy techniques (AFM, SEM, and
Analytical SEM), image analysis, and computational intelligence models
(NN-Neural Network; CA-Cellular Automata; and PSO-Particle Swarm
Optimization). The developed models will be validated using carefully
selected experiments and simulations.