Corrosion protection for sustainability – watching paint dry

Abstract

Corrosion protection for sustainability – watching paint dry Stuart Lyon, AkzoNobel Professor of Corrosion Control, looks at corrosion's cost to industrialised economies and the importance of corrosion protection – where car vehicle bodies suffer from rust perforation within a few years of purchase. Now manufacturers offer anti-perforation warranties for up to 12 years. Corrosion – the deterioration and loss of materials and their functional properties by environmental exposure – remains a significant cost to industrialised economies. Therefore the most practical and effective means of protection is to apply a coating, and the most widely used are paint coatings. Corrosion-protective organic coatings are engineered to optimise application (onto challenging surfaces) and lifetime performance. They comprise many ingredients including functional pigments that chemically inhibit the corrosion process, components that provide desired physical properties including hardness, wetting agents, rheology modifiers to enable correct surface flow from spray or brush application, etc. Overall, high-resolution analytical tools to probe the structure and chemistry of coatings and the interfaces between their constituent parts are being explored in the University of Manchester.