Breaks or holidays in pipe coatings may expose the pipe to possible corrosion, since after a pipe has been installed underground, the surrounding earth will be more or less moisture-bearing and it constitutes an effective electrolyte. Damage to pipe coating is almost unavoidable during transportation and construction. Normal soil potentials as well as applied cathodic protection potentials may cause loosening of the coating, beginning at holiday edges, in some cases increasing the apparent size of the holiday. Holidays may also be caused by such potentials. While apparently loosened coating and cathodic holidays may not result in corrosion, this test provides accelerated conditions for loosening to occur and therefore gives a measure of resistance of coatings to this type of action.

The effects of the test may be evaluated by either physical examination or monitoring the current drawn by the test specimen and both of these two. Usually there is no correlation between the two methods of evaluation but both methods are significant. Physical examination consists of assessing the effective contact of the coating with the metal surface in terms of observed differences in the relative adhesive bond. It is usually found that the electrically stressed area propagates from the holiday to a boundary where the loosened coating leaves off for the more effective contact or bond attributed to an original condition throughout the specimen before electrical stressing was applied. Assumptions associated with test results include the following:

Attempting to loosen or disbond the coating at a new test hole made in the coating in an area that was not immersed represents maximum adhesion or bond as measured by the lifting technique used, and that the same lifting technique can be used at a test hole that was immersed thereby providing a means of comparing relative resistance to lifting.

Any relatively lesser bonded area at the immersed test holes in the coating was caused by electrical stressing and was not attributable to an anomaly in the application process. Ability to resist disbondment is a desired quality on a comparative basis, but disbondment per se in this test is not necessarily an adverse indication. The virtue of this test is that all dielectric type coatings now in common use will disbond to some degree thus providing a means of comparing one coating with another. Bond strength is more important for proper functioning of some coatings than others and the same measured disbondment for two different coating systems may not represent equivalent loss of corrosion protection.

The amount of current in the test cell is a relative indicator of the extent of areas requiring protection against corrosion; however, the current density appearing in this test is much greater than that usually required for cathodic protection in natural, inland soil environments.