Corrosion
Corrosion is one of the degradation mechanisms in many structural metals. Among various aspects of corrosion, pitting corrosion is a complex process and is very common in aluminum and steel alloys. A fundamental aspect of pitting corrosion failure mechanisms is that they tend to initiate at the micro/nano-structure level. The details of the mechanisms vary with material composition, electrolyte and other environmental conditions. An improved understanding of the evolution of the chemical elements degradation during the corrosion process would be of practical importance in designing improved structural metals to better suit specific environmental conditions. The current materials development technology does not take into account chemical element analysis during degradation, which might be useful to understand and evaluate structural integrity. Currently, we are investigating the chemical elements degradation during the corrosion process through modeling and simulations combined with controlled experiments. Specifically, we are investigating the critical parameters/rules at multiple levels through controlled experiments with microscopy techniques (AFM, SEM, and Analytical SEM), image analysis, and computational intelligence models (NN-Neural Network; CA-Cellular Automata; and PSO-Particle Swarm Optimization). The developed models will be validated using carefully selected experiments and simulations.