Grounding grid materials are vulnerable to soil corrosion, which is detrimental to the safe operation of the grounding grids and even lead to serious accidents of power transmission. In this paper, galvanized steel was used as the typical grounding grid material which was buried in the soil and then electrified with AC and DC current for two weeks. The corroded samples under different current conditions were characterized and compared. The experimental results show that the corrosion degree of galvanized steel gradually aggravated with the increasing of the current, especially under DC current. Further, the mechanism of the influence of current on soil corrosion is explored. It is found that under the same magnitude of current, the corrosion degree of galvanized steel under DC current is greater than that under AC current.
Keywords: corrosion behavior; electric current; galvanized steel; grounding grids.