2 - Corrosion behaviour of low-alloy steels: from ancient past to far future

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses corrosion behavior of low-alloy steels. The large variety of situations encountered in corrosion and the complexity of the phenomena, which involve numerous interconnected physicochemical steps, make modeling and behavior predictions very difficult. This is probably the reason corrosion models are still often semi-empirical, which restricts considerably the possibilities of extrapolations. With the concepts envisaged of long-term storage and underground disposal of high-level radioactive waste, corrosion science has to face a new challenge, to obtain reliable behavior predictions over very long periods of time, up to thousands of years. For such durations, the development of mechanistically-based models becomes an absolute necessity. Moreover, for the construction and validation of these models, laboratory tests are no longer sufficient; there is a strong need for detailed examination of objects corroded for a long time. Archaeological analogues could provide such information, but the differences between ancient and modern materials, and also the usually poor knowledge about the initial conditions and the variation of the environmental factors with time, make the use of this information rather delicate. The chapter presents a few examples of possible contributions of archaeological analogues to the understanding and modeling of long-term corrosion processes. The illustrations presented in the chapter suggest that detailed investigations using archaeological analogues are able to provide useful information for the mechanistic modeling of long-term corrosion behavior of ferrous materials, but that their use for this purpose is a very difficult task.