Mexican airline jet turbine blade hot corrosion

Hot corrosion by sulfur/oxygen occurs in a narrow 100°C window where the kinetics peak and the sulfide condenses. Mexican airline practiced no-warmup full-power takeoffs to save fuel, dwelling in the corrosion-sensitive temperature band for the critical minutes that they should have spent above it.

This is an example of hot corrosion at high temperatures, not aqueous systems. This is what a turbine blade is supposed to look like — this came out of a commercial airliner engine. This is hot corrosion by sulfur and oxygen — sulfur and oxygen are the two things that create problems. Here's the plot — and you have to notice there's a break here. This is 200 up here, there's a break from a hundred to 180. This is the corrosion rate, it goes up by a factor of a hundred in a very narrow range. Usually you're operating well up here. It's too hot for the sulfur oxide to condense on the surface. If you look at where it corroded, it's all kinds of bubbles — those are sulfide bubbles or nickel sulfide bubbles. Over here the kinetics are too slow, but it can still occur. But in a very narrow range of a hundred degrees centigrade or so, you have really appreciable corrosion.