Electromagnetic methods for corrosion under paint coating measurement

Abstract

Corrosion under coating has a serious effect on the metal conductivity and corrosion layer permittivity. A high frequency (13.56 MHz) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based system has been developed to measure corrosion under coating. The corrosion behaviour of coated steel has been investigated from a very fundamental understanding of permittivity using a Vector Network Analyser (VNA). This paper will first review corrosion and dielectric property measurement methods and investigate RFID tag antenna responses under different material properties of corrosion samples with atmospheric exposure times using VNA. The purpose of this study was to examine the RFID system for corrosion detection. The RFID tag’s coil and VNA are employed to measure the impedance change to determine the conductivity and relative permittivity variance with different atmospheric exposure times (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 10 months and 12 months). Different spectrum distributions under different corrosion samples are investigated. Based on the studies, VNA based system testing, phase responses from the mild steel samples with different coating thickness are measured. The experimental results show that these two introduced techniques are able to distinguish between different exposure times with coating. Based on the results, corrosion detection under coating using equivalent permittivity and conductivity are developed and evaluated. Preliminary results show that the high frequency (HF) RFID method can be extended to a new application for detection of corrosion under coating and development of HF RFID systems for corrosion monitoring. Dielectric probe is applied to measure the permittivity variance with different paint thickness. With the paint thickness increasing, the dielectric is getting close to the paint’s properties. Waveguide is using here to measure the paint thickness effect for further UHF RFID study.