ABSTRACT

Crevice corrosion is a very insidious and widespread form of localized corrosion in industrial plants and in marine applications. During the past ten years many efforts have been addressed to the production of more resistant new materials, and many attempts have been made to define more reliable test methods for assessing crevice corrosion resistance. Unfortunately, results have not been encouraging thus far. For this reason the problem of localized corrosion is often tackled by using mathematical and physical models, or by applying artificial intelligence systems (eg. expert system, neural network, hypertext). In this paper, a phenomenological tree is developed, where physico-chemical phenomena involved in crevice corrosion processes are described on the basis of the mixed potential theory and with the aid of the fundamentals of expert systems.