Identifying Corrosion Zones in Coastal Regions for Metal Pipes -- A GIS Approach

Transportation agencies often allow metal pipes as an option for cross drains under/along roads and highways. Metal culverts can corrode over time at various rates based on their environmental conditions (e.g., corrosive nature of coastal soils, high water table and saltwater intrusion). This paper focuses on applying readily available soil data such as spatial distribution of soil types and soil characteristics (e.g., pH and conductivity) towards creating a geospatial information system (GIS) based approach to identifying corrosion zones in the coastal regions. A combination of data, obtained from field surveys provided by the Louisiana Transportation Research Center and Web Soil Survey Data provided by Natural Resources Conservation Service, were used to create an interpolated surface representing zones corrosive to metal culverts. The role of the soil characteristics was incorporated in to the previously established corrosion models in identifying zones that will cause corrosion causing conditions for metal pipes.