Pitted Corrosion Detection of Thermal Sprayed Metallic Coatings Using Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors

Metallic coatings using thermal spraying techniques are widely applied to structural steels to protect infrastructure against corrosion and improve durability of the associated structures for longer service life. The thermal sprayed metallic coatings consisting of various metals, although have higher corrosion resistance, will still corrode in a long run and may also subject to corrosion induced damages such as cracks. Corrosion and the induced damages on the metallic coatings will reduce the effectiveness of the coatings for protection of the structures. Timely repair on these damaged metallic coatings will significantly improve the reliability of protected structures again deterioration. In this paper, an inline detection system for corrosion and crack detection was developed using fiber Bragg (FBG) grating sensors. Experimental results from laboratory accelerated corrosion tests showed that the developed sensing system can quantitatively detect corrosion rate of the coating, corrosion propagations, and cracks initialized in the metallic coating in real time. The developed system can be used for real-time corrosion detection of coated metal structures in field.