Measuring corrosion rates: a novel AC method based on processing and analysing signals recorded in the time domain

In this work, a novel method for the determination of instantaneous corrosion rates icorr is proposed. It relies on recording the current response in the time domain upon imposing an AC voltage signal, and a computational procedure to remove non-faradaic currents and to analyse the data. The method was applied to steel in stirred, unstirred, and sand-filled 1 M KCl; the resulting icorr compared well with different conventional techniques. The proposed method is robust, non-destructive and fast. In addition to icorr, it provides also an estimate of the capacitance and Tafel slopes (thus, no assumption on constant B is required).