Publications

Steel support structures of offshore wind turbines (jackets and monopiles) undergo both fatigue and corrosion damage, impacting their lifetime. This paper investigates how pitting corrosion, caused by being exposed to the marine environment, affects the fatigue strength of structural steel. A short fatigue crack model is used to estimate the minimum required applied load amplitude which causes a growing crack emanating from the bottom of a ...

A multi ion transport and reaction model has been developed with the intent to improve via simulation the understanding of the first steps of localized corrosion (pitting) of aluminum alloys at the microscale. However, the onset of pitting could not be predicted, but the simulation of all parts of a micropolarization curve, excluding the pitting regime, was possible. Unlike previous models, the model does not use the assumption that the system ...

Pitting corrosion is a common cause of concern for steel structures in an offshore environment. As geometric stress concentrating features, corrosion pits can potentially act as fatigue crack initiation sites. The current study is a part of the MAXWind project which, amongst others, aims to develop numerical tools for a more accurate estimate of the remaining lifetime of in-service wind turbines. UGent is responsible for developing an advanced ...

© 2019 The mechanism of inclusion-induced initial pitting corrosion of Al-Ti-Ca complex deoxidized steel with Ce treatment was studied by the experimental investigation and theoretical calculation. To figure out which phases of complex inclusion containing different components induced initial pitting corrosion, the scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis, the continuous immersion experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculation ...

The impact of 316L stainless steel discolouration on chloride induced pitting corrosion was quantified. Several degrees of discolouration were produces by chemical passivation, simulated rouging or anodic polarization. Discolouration was characterized by spectral analysis in the visible and NIR range (400-1000 nm). Pitting corrosion resistance was quantified by pitting potential measurements. The spectra were used to indicate whether pitting or ...

By using the electrochemical frequency modulation (EFM) technique, the non-linear behavior of a corroding system is measured. This non-linear behavior is likely to be different for a system undergoing uniform or pitting corrosion. The implementation of the EFM technique to detect pitting corrosion has been investigated by observing the fluctuations in the so-called causality factors. These causality factors, resulting from an EFM test and in the ...

The disposal of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) in deep stable geological formations is accepted at an international level to be the most promising option for its long-term management. The supercontainer concept is currently being considered as the Belgian reference design, wherein the waste will be stored in geological stable clay formations. The outer barrier of the supercontainer is the envelope, which should be made of a ...