Influence of environmental factors on corrosion damage of aircraft structure

Corrosion is one of the important structural integrity concerns of aging aircraft, and it is estimated that a significant portion of airframe maintenance budgets is directed towards corrosion-related problems for both military and commercial aircraft. In order to better understand how environmental factors influence the corrosion damage initiation and propagation on aircraft structure and to predict pre-corrosion test pieces of fatigue life and structural integrity of an effective approach, this paper uses the cellular automaton (CA) method to character the effect of electrolyte concentrations, dissolution probabilities, and temperature on the corrosion damage of a metal structure exposed to an aggressive environment, and the procedure for applying the local rules between the cells of the CA to simulate the corrosion damage evolution is formulated. The simulation results show that the different electrolyte concentrations, dissolution probabilities and temperature, the laws of the dissolution current with time are investigated and they obey the time power function.