Patent ID: 8457906

Claim:
A method for identifying corrosion types, the method comprising: examining a solid surface having corrosion using an examination subsystem to obtain at least one image; representing the image as a three-dimensional mathematical surface using a modeling subsystem; using an analysis subsystem for: fitting the three-dimensional mathematical surface to a parametric surface composed of one or more curved and/or polygonal shapes, where the parametric surface is selected from the group consisting of: a. parametric surface of n cones; b. parametric surface of n cut spheroids; c. parametric surface of n ellipsoids; d. parametric surface of n cylinders; e. parametric surfaces of n pyramids; and f. combinations thereof, where n represents the number of indicated shapes in the parametric surface; determining representative parameters from the parametric surface; and identifying a corrosion type by the best fit of the representative parameters known to be correlated to a particular corrosion type, where the corrosion type is selected from the group consisting of: i. CO 2 corrosion of mild steel; ii. H 2 S corrosion of mild steel; iii. oxygen corrosion of mild steel; iv. acid-producing bacterial corrosion of mild steel; v. mesa corrosion; and vi. combinations thereof.