International.
A research team has discovered a manufacturing process and material for a smart coating that offers better protection against oxidation and corrosion.
The discovery provides a boost for the steel industry, helping it maintain its focus on high-quality steel by meeting the highest standards of performance and safety. The breakthrough is of particular importance because the industry needs an alternative to the most widely used corrosion inhibitor today, hexavalent chromate, which for example, will be banned in the European Union from 2019.
Led by Professor Geraint Williams, the team, based in Swansea University's School of Engineering, discovered the process that outperforms hexavalent chromate in laboratory tests.
The new method involves a stored deposit of corrosion inhibitor. It works by channeling aggressive electrolyte anions into the coating, causing the release of the inhibitor "on demand", thus preventing corrosion. The product has been tested with salt spray, standard test for corrosion, beating hexavalent chromate.
The researchers used a Kelvin scanning probe, specially built by the team, that can detect the state of the metal under a coating without touching it. This allowed them to test different products much more quickly. Each test takes around 24 hours, rather than 500 hours as was the case previously.
The discovery could lead the product to have a significant share of a market of several million euros. The coil coatings steel market has a potential value of €3.8 billion a year in Europe alone.
Source: www.swansea.ac.uk
