Prediction of tensile strength degradation of corroded steel based on in-situ pitting evolution

Steel is becoming increasingly popular due to its high strength, excellent ductility, great assembly performance, and recyclability. In reality, steel structures serving for a long time in atmospheric, industrial, and marine environments inevitably suffer from corrosion, which significantly decreases the durability and the service life with the exposure time. For the mechanical properties of corroded steel, experimental studies are mainly conducted. The existing numerical analyses only evaluate the mechanical properties based on corroded morphology at the isolated time-in-point, ignoring that this morphology varies continuously with corrosion time. To solve this problem, the relationships between pit depth expectation, standard deviation, and corrosion time are initially constructed based on a large amount of wet-dry cyclic accelerated test data. Successively, based on that, an in-situ pitting evolution method for evaluating the residual tensile strength of corroded steel is proposed. To verify the method, 20 repeated simulations of mass loss rates and mechanical properties are adopted against the test results. Then, numerical analyses are conducted on 135 models of corrosion pits with different aspect ratios and uneven corrosion degree on two corroded surfaces. Results show that the power function with exponents of 1.483 and 1.091 can well describe the increase in pit depth expectation and standard deviation with corrosion time, respectively. The effect of the commonly used pit aspect ratios of 0.10-0.25 on yield strength and ultimate strength is negligible. Besides, pit number ratio alpha equating to 0.6 is the critical value for the strength degradation. When alpha is less than 0.6, the pit number increases with alpha, accelerating the degradation of strength. Otherwise, the strength degradation is weakened. In addition, a power function model is adopted to characterize the degradation of yield strength and ultimate strength with corrosion time, which is revised by initial steel plate thickness.