Abstract
Marine ships have played an important role as a carrier, transporting much more than 80% of all international trading, and marine transportation is an internationally competitive, strategic, and great national important industry. However, those marine ships have the characteristics such as voyage of long distance, large-volume and lower speed than the other carry system. Therefore, it is important to manufacture a larger and faster ship, however, the steel plates which are consisted with most of those ships has brought about many corrosion problems in sea water such as general corrosion, localized corrosion, cavitation and erosion corrosion etc.. Most hulls of the ships have been protected with paintings, sacrificial anode, marine growth prevention system, and impressed current cathodic protection methods against numerious corrosion problems mentioned above. However, these conventional methods are not very effective because the rudder of ships stern are exposed to very severe corrosive environment such as tides, speeds of ships, cavitations and erosion corrosion, etc.. In this study, electrochemical and cavitation characteristics was investigated for the rudder material of ship which is exposed to serious corrosive environment. As a result, it is considered that the optimum cathodic protection potentials of rudder material is the range of -0.6 V ~ -0.8 V(Ag/AgCl) in static seawater.