In the spring of 2007, the cooling water chemistry at a large automotive plant in Los Angeles,
California, was changed from traditional chemical treatment of potable water to recycled water treated
with a new zero blowdown chemistry. To establish the localized copper corrosion baseline during this
transition, coupled multielectrode array sensors (CMAS) were installed in the sampling station of the
cooling water system and corrosion monitoring was performed on real time basis in the plant.
The CMAS corrosion monitoring was implemented as a means to rapidly confirm the
effectiveness of the new corrosion control technology in protecting copper exchanger tubes in a
potential highly corrosive environment. The need for rapid real time confirmation of effective copper
corrosion inhibition with CMAS was based on presence of critical copper exchange surfaces in the
customer system that would be exposed to the presence of 30 to 40 mg/L of ammonia in the recycled
municipal waste water used as tower makeup.
Prior experience using linear polarization resistance (LPR) and weight loss methods to
determine corrosion rates indicated they were not effective in reliably detecting changes in corrosion in
high dissolved solids water with this treatment method, primarily due to the extraordinarily low corrosion
rates with this chemistry for steel, copper and other metals. Further, there was no prior monitoring
experience with copper exposed to ammonia in high TDS chemistry to indicate that previous low
corrosion rates could be maintained with this new chemistry.
Keywords: zero blowdown, corrosion inhibition, cooling tower corrosion, cooling water corrosion,
multielectrode, corrosion monitoring, corrosion sensor, localized corrosion sensor, multielectrode array,
and coupled multielectrode.