Mathematical Model of Surface Topography of Corroded Steel Foundation in Submarine Soil Environment

Abstract

For the corrosion risk of steel structures in the marine environment, the topography characteristics of corroded steel surfaces were paid little attention to, which has a significant effect on the mechanical properties of the interface between steel foundation and soil medium. An effective mathematical model for reconstructing the topography of corroded steel surface is very helpful for numerically or experimentally studying the soil-corroded steel interaction properties. In this study, an electrolytic accelerated corrosion experiment is conducted first to obtain corroded steel samples, which are exposed to submarine soil and suffer different corrosion degrees. Then, the surface height data of these corroded steel samples are scanned and analyzed. It is found that the height of surface two-dimensional contour curves under different corrosion degrees obeys the Gaussian distribution. Based on the spectral representation method, a mathematical model is developed for the profile height of the corroded steel surface. By comparing the standard deviation, arithmetic mean height and maximum height of reconstructed samples with those of experimental samples, the reliability of the developed mathematical model is proved. The proposed mathematical model can be adapted to reconstruct the surface topography of steel with different corrosion degrees for the following research on the shearing behavior of soil-corroded steel interface.