An improved grey model for corrosion prediction of tank bottom

Leakage of a storage tank caused by the corrosion of its bottom contaminates soils and underground waters. The tank operators must monitor and control the underground corrosion of the tank bottom. Though it is difficult to observe the underground corrosion of a tank bottom, the corrosion depth progress can be predicted by forecasting models. An improved first-order one-variable grey prediction model (IGM(1, 1) model) was proposed for the corrosion prediction of the tank bottom. The IGM model used the synthesizing grey correlation degree as weights to modify the results from GM (1, 1) models based on long and short son data sequence from the identical original data. The IGM model was applied to simulate the corrosion depth progress of a tank bottom from 1994 to 1999. Results showed the IGM dynamic model be more precise than the existing GM (1, 1) one. It is an effective tool to predicting the tank bottom corrosion. The corrosion depth values of tank bottom from 2000 to 2001 were well predicted.