Corrosion rate estimates
Corrosion of archaeological ferrous artefacts

As a complement to the study of mechanisms, it is extremely interesting, in the context of predicting corrosion behavior, to evaluate the metal loss rates of archaeological objects as a function of their age and burial conditions. The main difficulty here lies in the fact that the exact initial dimensions of the archaeological object are unknown. Three different approaches can therefore be applied:

• an empirical approach, based on the approximate measurement of the thickness of corrosion products from a very large number of samples;

• a more refined analytical approach based on the measurement of local iron content;

• electrochemical techniques, in particular chronoamperometry.

Each of these methods has its own intrinsic limitations: