NEW NONINVASIVE SENSOR FOR MONITORING CORROSION IN HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

EXPERIMENTS AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, AND QUANTUM MAGNETICS HAVE SHOW THAT CORROSION REACTIONS CREATE MEASURABLE MAGNETIC FIELDS. IN CONTRAST TO OTHER TECHNIQUES, MAGNETIC DETECTION OFFERS THE POSSIBILITY OF DIRECTLY DETECTING CORROSION PROCESSES NONINVASIVELY FROM OUTSIDE THE CORRODING VESSEL. IN PHASE 1, IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MARINE CORROSION FACILITY OF THE NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY, WE WILL PERFORM EXPERIMENTS ON INCANEL COUPONS AND ACTUAL HIGH PRESSURE TUBING TO DEMONSTRATE THAT SUCH MAGNETIC FIELDS CAN BE DETECTED WITHOUT GAINING ACCESS TO THE HARSH ENVIRONMENT. WE WILL ALSO DETERMINE THE PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS FOR A MAGNETIC SENSOR TO SATISFY A BROAD RANGE OF CORROSION DETECTION PROBLEMS. IN PHASE 2, WE WILL DEVELOP A LOW COST MAGNETIC SENSOR BASED ON AN EXISTING MAGNETIC DETECTION TECHNOLOGY. THE SENSOR WILL BE OPTIMIZED FOR LARGE SCALE MONITORING OF CORROSION IN A WIDE RANGE OF HARSH ENVIRONMENT APPLICATIONS.