Degradation of mechanical properties of corroded steel plates – testing and prediction based on multifractal characteristics of surface morphology
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Yuan, Huanxin
Guo, Peng
Gardner, Leroy
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
A comprehensive study into the degradation behaviour of corroded steel plates is presented in this paper. Employing an accelerated corrosion testing method, hot-rolled Q235B steel plates with clean surfaces were exposed to a severe corrosive environment characterised by repeated cycles of exposure to salt spray, dry conditions and wet conditions. The morphology of the corroded plates was experimentally recorded by surface scanning, enabling the determination of the multifractal characteristics. Standard tensile coupon tests were carried out to acquire the mechanical properties of the corroded plates. It was revealed that the degradation of mechanical properties became increasingly significant with higher corrosion mass loss ratios, and the resulting strength reduction was more pronounced than that calculated based on the assumption of uniform thickness reduction. By incorporating the ranges of determined multifractal parameters, a new three-dimensional (3D) cellular automaton (CA) programme was developed to simulate the corrosion process and generate a range of morphologies. Advanced finite element (FE) models of the corroded steel coupons were developed, and were validated against the experimental results. Further numerical simulations were conducted using the generated morphologies to explore the influence of the multifractal features, and a novel unified degradation model based on the multifractal parameters was proposed to predict the mechanical properties of corroded plates.
Date Issued
2025-05-23
Date Acceptance
2025-04-08
Citation
Construction and Building Materials, 2025, 476
ISSN
0950-0618
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Journal / Book Title
Construction and Building Materials
Volume
476
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2025 Elsevier Ltd. This is the author’s accepted manuscript made available under a CC-BY licence in accordance with Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access policy (www.imperial.ac.uk/oa-policy)
License URL
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
141280
Date Publish Online
2025-04-14