Water flow velocity and oxide film formation effect on copper pipe corrosion

Abstract

An overall mathematical model for copper pipe corrosion in flowing water was derived based on mass transfer fundamentals where we introduced the effects of boundary layer velocity, bulk flow velocity and the surface oxide protective film on the corrosion rate. A set of experiments were conducted in a straight 10mm diameter copper pipe, flow of water include six velocities of maximum value 7.33m/sec at 200C and 350C. The good agreement between the calculated and experimental corrosion rate values were achieved , the agreement reached 92% .