Effect of local corrosion on tensile behavior of steel plates

Steel structures are susceptible to local corrosion due to the reasons such as the failure of anticorrosive coating, which is a serious threat to the normal use of steel structures, and even causes some tragic accidents. This paper focused on the tensile behavior of locally corroded steel plates. To develop the critical data of such steel plates, uniformly corroded and locally corroded steel plate specimens with different corrosion periods were prepared by artificially accelerated salt spray test. Subsequently, monotonic tensile tests were carried out on a total of 51 corroded and uncorroded specimens. The results revealed that the load–displacement curves of corroded specimens were significantly different from that of uncorroded specimens. In addition, the uniform corrosion had little effect on the actual stress of specimens, while the fully yield stress of the locally corroded specimens was clearly higher than that of uncorroded specimens due to stress concentration. Whereafter, an empirical formula with surface roughness parameters for predicting the elongation degradation of the locally corroded tensile steel plate was proposed based on the previous studies and the experimental data in this research. Finally, the finite element model of the locally corroded specimen under monotonic tensile load was established and the stress distribution in the local corrosion region was analyzed, which demonstrated that the maximum corrosion depth had a substantial effect on the stress concentration.