Prediction of short- and long-term atmospheric corrosion in the changing low pollution climate for inland and coastal areas

Abstract This paper studies the impact of the changing climate on atmospheric corrosion loss in the future low pollution environment. Two climate change scenarios (SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5) are studied and they reveal a warmer environment with decreasing sulphur dioxide contamination and slightly changed relative humidity and precipitation from 2010 to 2100. As a consequence, environment corrosivity is both enhanced by increased time-of-wetness and weakened by decreased sulphur dioxide deposition rate. To consider the low pollution environment in the future changing climate, a relative error minimized short-term corrosion model and a re-scaled power-linear long-term corrosion model are proposed. Corrosion loss evaluation results show that, on the overall scale which is mainly representative of remote rural areas, first-year corrosion loss C of different metals under the two SSPs has different trends. On the regional scale of urban and marine areas with high SO 2 or Cl − levels, C will decrease continuously under both SSPs for all three metals. The long-term corrosion loss will also decrease as the environment continues to be less and less corrosive.