Classification of pitting corrosion damage in process facilities using supervised machine learning

Abstract

Corrosion is widely known to be a major cause of the failures in process facilities. Prediction of corrosion damage is therefore essential for industries to manage the availability of their assets. This research aims to investigate the application of supervised machine learning methods for the classification of pitting corrosion damage. Several machine learning classifiers, namely ensemble methods, support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbours, and the decision tree are used to classify the extent of pitting corrosion damage in corroded steel samples. To simulate the corrosion of the steel samples, a series of laboratory experiments were conducted. After processing the results using appropriate statistical methods, the corrosion data was used to train the machine learning models. The trained models can predict the class of corrosion damage with acceptable accuracy using the material and environmental specifications of the samples. Additionally, a discussion on the selection of machine learning techniques which classify corrosion damage using a risk-based approach is provided. With their optimal accuracy and lower risk of misclassification, the SVM and AdaBoost models perform better than the other studied models.