Electrochemical techniques are available for monitoring the long-term performance of materials in the plant environment. Many of these techniques such as current and potential logging have the ability to collect vast quantities of data in relatively short time frames. These needs to resolved into more meaningful information as the time required to analyze all this data is too great. Statistic analyses can be undertaken as the data is collected to help identify periods of interest and allow these periods of activity to be examined in detail.
As computer and instrumentation technologies have developed the corrosion engineer now has the ability to capture corrosion information at aerate not previously possible. The speed~ of CPU?s and the existence of relatively cheap data storage presents us with a totally different problem. What to do with the data. The problem is not how to get data it becomes what do you do with it. The power of real-time corrosion monitoring when coupled with other process and chemical monitoring is that conditions which cause corrosion can be identified, related to the operation then controlled. In order to do this we have to make the step from collecting information.
