Monitoring of different corrosion types through the application of wavelet transform to current noise records

Abstract

The most important difficulty to use electrochemical noise measurement resides in the interpretation of the experimental data. In the literature, three different main approaches have been proposed for processing the experimental records: the statistical, the spectral and the Chaos-Theory based methods. The purpose of this work is to introduce an alternative tool to analyse electrochemical noise: the wavelet transform. It has been found that this tool could be especially usefully to distinguish localised and uniform corrosion processes that are developing simultaneously. To show that, a current noise record corresponding to working electrodes suffering from both kind of corrosion process is analysed by means of the wavelet transform. These results are compared with the ones coming form the Fourier. In addition, a brief theoretical description of the tool is presented and some applications in the field of the industrial monitoring are suggested.