It is difficult for us in the 21st century to imagine some of the hazards and dangers that were associated with the Industrial Revolution as it spread across the developed world 200 years ago. It was steam that drove the revolution, with boilers providing the energy for the locomotives and steam ships, as well as...
5th June 2019
Not far from Piccadilly Circus in London’s West End, stands the impressive Royal Institution building, opened in 1799 for the advancement of science. In this building, two of the most eminent scientists of the nineteenth century made significant contributions to corrosion science and technology, including work on the fundamentals of galvanic corrosion, discovery of cathodic...
30th May 2019
If you work in corrosion control, you will undoubtedly come across epoxy coatings. They are used wherever steel has to be protected against corrosion— offshore platforms, onshore oil and gas production, refineries, petrochemical plants, power plants, bridges, ships, wharfs, and many more. They will protect steel in the atmosphere from rusting by preventing oxygen and...
28th May 2019
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Australian government decided to build a blast furnace and shipyard near the then main source of iron ore at Whyalla in South Australia. However, as this site was on the edge of a desert, fresh water needed to be piped 360 km from Morgan on the...
26th May 2019
Corrugated iron is a widely used building material whose importance is rarely acknowledged. It is used in all climates, all terrains, is cheap and easily fabricated into all sorts of buildings, and can probably claim to shelter more people from the elements than any other building material. Corrugated iron, often incorrectly called “tin,” is usually...
23rd May 2019
With the Delhi Pillar (Delhi, India), improved corrosion resistance was achieved through alloy additions to the iron, but this was the result of luck with the ore used. It was not until the late Victorian era that scientific investigations produced the precursors to the modern corrosion-resistant steels in use today. The discovery in 1882 of...
21st May 2019
The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309 AMARG) at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (Tucson, Arizona, USA), commonly known as “The Boneyard,” is probably one of the strangest airfields in the world. It’s here that the U.S. Air Force, Navy-Marine Corps, Army, Coast Guard, and several federal agencies (including NASA) store their obsolete, unwanted,...
16th May 2019
In about 88 AD, a remote Roman legion at the Inchtuthil fortress on the north bank of the Tay River was ordered back to the European mainland. Unable or unwilling to transport nearly a million iron nails with it, the legion dug a pit and buried them. Since iron could be used for weapons, agriculture,...
13th May 2019
Of the many wonderful things that Howard Carter found in the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, a small iron dagger may seem insignificant compared to the numerous gold, silver, and beautifully colored objects that the Egyptian boy king is famous for. But to the corrosionist, this item is remarkable because it just may be the...
9th May 2019
Corrosion, being a reaction between a material and its environment, can be minimised by creating a benign environment rather than looking at expensive materials such as iridium. And, in theory, it is not hard to find a very benign environment—simply head upwards for 100 km or so into space.
7th May 2019
Rust — your nontechnical friends and family will probably think this is all you deal with in your work in the corrosion industry. But we all know our work involves much more than this. This series of short articles—in honour of NACE International’s 75th Anniversary—attempts to paint a more positive and optimistic picture of the...
5th May 2019
In the courtyard of a ruined mosque at the Qutub Minar complex not far from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport in northern India, stands a pillar of iron that has remained rust-free since it was fabricated in ~400 A.D. The 6-ton pillar was originally forged and erected in central India during the Gupta period, but...
5th May 2019