The design and development of an embeddable corrosion measurement microsystem which takes advantage of the increased availability of Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) development and Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit manufacturing is described. Key elements of the system (micropotentiostat with zero resistance ammeter (ZRA) and analog-to-digital (ND) and digitrd-to-analog (D/A) converters were tested electronically and found to perform satisfactorily. The micropotentiostad ZRA combination was also tested on steel electrodes exposed to 0.6 M NaCl, saturated Ca(OH)2, and saturated Ca(OH)2 + 0.6 M NaCl. Comparisons of polarization resistance data generated by the micropotentiostat and commercially available systems demonstrated that the two systems performed equivalently. The 10-bit A/D and 6-bit D/A converters exhibited excellent linearity over a wide range of inputs. Future directions for the development of the embeddable corrosion measurement microsystem are also outlined.
Keywords: corrosion monitoring, polarization resistance, corrosion rate, instrmnentation, microsystem, steel