Corrosion behavior of mild-steel in cooling towers using high salinity solution

Cooling towers is one of the most important unit in industry, they are used to dispose heat from cooling media used in the integrated units. The choice of the cooling media plays recently an important rule due to fresh-water scarcity. The use of saline as a cooling media become of growing interest, but the corrosion problem has to be taken in consideration. In this study the simultaneous effect of cooling tower operation parameters on the corrosion rate of mild-steel is considered. The role of NaCl content is found to be pronounced more than the working solution temperature and flowrate. The corrosion of mild-steel in these studied factors had shown an interesting result especially with the NaCl% content. Firstly, there was an increase in the corrosion rate with increasing the salt content to 3.5% four times compared to that of 0%, but after a critical point (3.5%) the corrosion rate had been decreased to reach a level lower than that of pure water. While increasing the solution flowrate to 2.5 l/min and the temperature to 50ᴼC will increase the corrosion rate by 25 and 20% respectively. From the results, it is obvious that the high concentration (>10%) of NaCl will inhibit the corrosion rate of mild-steel significantly and this prologue the gate to the use of saline instead of fresh water without hesitation.