Indoor atmospheric corrosion of steel.: Its particularities in Cuban tropical climate

Indoor atmospheric corrosion and deterioration of materials is significantly lower respecting outdoors. After 1960, because of the problems detected in electric and electronic equipment and to the requirements for conservation of valuable heritage objects in museums, attention was dedicated to corrosion problems in indoor atmospheres. A small corrosion may cause a bad performance of electric and electronic equipment due to different factors as: change in electrical resistance of contacts, change in conductivity, loss of magnetic properties and others. In the paper corrosion aggressivity of steel inside storehouses and metallic boxes is classified using the new ISO proposal for indoor conditions. Corrosion aggressivity is reported for steel. The levels of aggressivity are reported. They correspond to the higher levels established in the standard proposal. A model for corrosion of steel in function of time of exposure is proposed taking into consideration some atmospheric pollutants. The model has an acceptable fitness to experimental data. It is observed that deposited dust is an important factor in steel corrosion process indoor.