Abstract：The damage caused by environmental corrosion in the rail service process will directly threaten operation safety. Therefore, the quantitative characterization of rail corrosion damage is of great significance to the reliability evaluation of rails. The uniform corrosion experiments of U71Mn hot-rolled rail samples in 3.5wt.% NaCl solution at room temperature were first carried out, and the change of diameters of two samples with corrosion time was measured. According to the experimental results, the corrosion mechanism of rail samples in 3.5wt.% Nacl salt solution was analyzed. Then, the corrosion model of rail samples was established using the cellular automata method, and the uniform corrosion behavior of rail samples in 3.5wt.% NaCl solution was simulated. The corrosion rate was quantified according to the changes in sample diameters after different corrosion time simulated by the cellular automata method. A unified prediction formula for different sample diameters with corrosion time was established. The results show that the average relative error between the predicted results and the actual measured results is 8.7%, which implies that the uniform corrosion process of U71Mn hot rolled rail samples can be reasonably simulated using the cellular automata method.
2024, Vol. 45 
