A New Approach to Probing Localized Corrosion of Pipelines

This article provides an overview of recent research aimed at visualizing and probing localized corrosion of buried steel pipelines using variously designed electrochemically integrated multi-electrode array probes. Several case studies are presented to illustrate some unique advantages of the multi-electrode arrays for understanding complex forms of localized corrosion, in particular corrosion under disbonded coatings and stray current corrosion, that remain critical issues for buried steel pipelines. Discussion has also been extended to future work needed to enhance the reliability of corrosion probes as a structural health monitoring tool for early detection, diagnosis, modelling, and prediction of pipeline corrosion.