Aerospace Corrosion Simulation: Pristine to Pitted and Beyond (C2026-00411)

Andres Peratta, Robert Adey, Sharon Mellings, Thomas Curtin

There have been significant advancements in the development and application of corrosion modeling tools for the aerospace defense industry. Modeling software has been created to determine corrosion rates using mixed-potential theory and polarization curve crossing principles. This software can also perform optimized deconvolution on polarization curves and analytically transform curves to represent different environments. The industry is also seeing significant advancements in the simulation of aircraft component corrosion behavior using 3D FEA Multiphysics modeling. The advent of this capability is important when dealing with actual component geometry because the IR drop in the electrolyte film can have significant effects on the spatial distribution and magnitude of corrosion rates. Recent strides have been made incorporating corrosion related degradation into model-based simulation engineering tools to track damage across the life cycle and provide critical information to engineers charged with structural integrity decision making. Innovative approaches have been developed to model cracking scenarios found at the boundary of corrosion cavities, simulate pit-to-crack transition, and perform corrosion fatigue crack propagation studies using environment representative crack growth kinetics. These new modeling approaches attempt to improve corrosion related damage assessment and advance from the previous ideas in Murakami’s defect area method and Kondo’s pit-to-crack competition model.