Skip to main content

The drain mystery

I recently moved to a new house. As expected, there was a lot of cleaning up to do. One of the tasks was the cleaning of the washbasin. Usually, the drain is a circular part with  5 to 6 holes for the water to flow out. What I saw was this -

I have not had a chance to analyse the material of the drain. However, a quick search tells me that this is most probably stainless steel. The water that this drain is exposed to is the bore water. Thus, the drain has encountered a lot of chlorides. There is general as well as localized corrosion.

The damage started off as a simple process of pitting. Pitting due to chlorides is one of the most common headaches for poor stainless steel. They break the passive oxide film, and reach the underlying fresh iron. This iron then reacts with the usual suspects (ions, oxygen, water) and forms what we see as the rust.

As can be seen in the picture, the thin sections of the drain between the holes have disappeared in three places. This may have happened because the pits formed continued to grow through the thickness of the material, which finally gave way and fell down the drain. The shape of the circle to the top left is distorted and we can observe a small nick in the circle. There is also a variation in the widths of each of the sections between the circles - all because of corrosion.

Then, there is the green color. This is the corrosion product ferric chloride. A quick look shows the green formation around the part between two holes at the top right. General corrosion is visible, and there may be pitting going on underneath the corrosion products.

We will have to wait and see if that small section is the next to break off.

UPDATE: It did break off.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CORROSPECTIVE TURNS 2!!

  Corrospective turns TWO! I am elated to announce a flat 50% discount on ALL of the courses on my website! CODE: 2YEARS Click here to go to the courses! - https://corrospective.com

Corrosion rate and pipe design

Corrosion is a serious issue. However, corrosion engineers are rarely asked about it during the designing of components. It is only when the components fail that people remember there are people who have studied corrosion for their whole life and would provide a solution. The design problems are really quite simple, and the loss of money could have been avoided had the company bothered to involve a corrosion engineer in the first place. Let me illustrate this with an example of a factory near the sea. Suppose a mild steel pipe is fitted inside the factory to transport 1 wt. % hydrochloric acid. The engineer has a choice between selecting pipes of 5 mm and 10 mm thickness. To save money, they go for the pipe with the 5 mm thickness because it has been 'successfully used by the other customers'. Over the course of a year, it is seen that the pipe has started leaking at certain places. Further investigation reveals that those sections have thinned to half of their thickn...