Abstract
In order to evaluate the atmospheric corrosivity in an electrical control unit room in a steelmaking plant by using quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensors, the temperature, relative humidity and corrosion rates of metals on QCM were monitored for five months. The metals employed for sensing corrosive gases were silver, copper and cobalt. The concentrations of the corrosive gases were estimated from the data of corrosion rates for these metals considering relative humidity. The temperature, relative humidity, and the corrosion rates in a given day were distributed according to the normal probability law. The concentrations of H2S, SO2 and NO2 were estimated from the mean values of the relative humidity and the corrosion rates of silver, copper and cobalt, which derived from the normal probability plots. The concentrations thus obtained were roughly close to those analyzed by conventional analytical methods. The atmospheric corrosivity will be able to estimate based on the monitoring of the corrosion rate with multichannel QCM sensors.
