Erosion Corrosion Control

Just the other day, I was out at my boat dock. While there, I saw that some guide poles for my Jet Ski Lift and the section of the dock that was always in the water had corroded quickly, in just over two years. It amazed me how bad the corrosion was and how bad it looked. The end pieces looked as if I had dipped them in acid and the acid ate away at the poles. As it turned out for this application, at my boat house, I simply had the wrong stainless steel pipe. But this costly exercise got me thinking about all of the industrial applications I have worked on and how I “blew” the design at my own home.

What I am primarily concerned with, in this article, is erosion corrosion control. Now, what is erosion corrosion? Well, no matter how you might look at it, erosion corrosion involves the degradation of the material by some mechanical action, in conjunction with a chemical interaction between the material and the media it is in contact with.