Modelling of the aluminium alloy Al 2024 from the microscale to the macroscale: intergranular corrosion

Aluminium-based alloys show good resistant to uniform (general) corrosion. However they are much more susceptible to various types of localised corrosion, in particular intergranular corrosion (IGC), where localised attack occurs along the grain boundaries leaving the grains themselves largely unaffected. In order to estimate the progress of such corrosion in a given sample, it is possible to generate a numerical model. While there has been much effort spent in the development of electrochemistry-based models, the use of grey and black-box models remains largely unexplored. Cellular Automata (CA) models that have recently been exploited to model the progression of uniform corrosion may be developed to address localised corrosion, more specifically IGC. A probabilistic approach is chosen because it enables the simulation of complex interactions by replacing the chemical processes by a discrete proxy.