The virtual corrosion engineer

At an industrial plant, the conventional corrosion management process consists of defining the expected process conditions, identifying potential corrosion threats and estimating their likely rate, then using that information to develop mitigation plans and inspection schedules. Eventually, over periods of years, inspection results are fed back to corrosion engineers, initial threat assessments are updated, and then the cycle is repeated. The Virtual Corrosion Engineer (VCE) project aims to improve the accuracy of this process and speed up the feedback cycle by taking advantage of the enormous quantity of process information that is already collected and digitally stored every day. The VCE utilizes actual monitoring data, automates running of the best available corrosion models and provides a continuously updated dashboard in real time. The overall goal is not to remove the need for real engineers, but to arm those people with the most accurate and up to date information in the most efficient possible way, thus freeing up their time to focus on decision-making and continuous improvement of the underlying models. In this paper, we provide an overview of the VCE together with more detailed discussion of the underlying models for specific exemplar damage mechanisms, including High Temperature Hydrogen Attack (HTHA) and Under Deposit Corrosion (UDC) in steam generators.