Corrosion protection – with a focus on sustainability

These days everybody talks about sustainability but to make it an engineering task, we need to be able to quantify it and to trace positive and negative sustainability impacts to concrete materials, components and actions in relation to our products and technologies. The talk will give a quantitative estimate of the sustainability challenge we face the coming decades and introduce life cycle assessment as the tool to measure environmental sustainability.

The use of life  cycle assessment (LCA) to quantify sustainability has been going on for years. In the coating industry it is often used to find the most sustainable alternative between coating systems.

The development within the general coating industry away from solvent-based products towards water based – or solvent-free – alternatives, is well under way and even though there are other drivers for the development than sustainability, it has shown to lead the industry in a sustainable direction.

Only a fraction of the coatings of the world are used for corrosion protection, and when looking here it is obvious that most coating systems used for corrosion protection of steel structures still contain quite a lot of solvents, and non-fossil based binders are – apart from special areas – seldom used.

Are the coating systems used for corrosion protection less sustainable than the remaining part of the coating industry, or are there other priorities we have to include when we evaluate the sustainability of coating system for corrosion protection?

This talk will try to answer the question by showing some examples on how to measure sustainability for coating systems.

Coating raw materials are typically derived from fossil-based feedstocks such as oil, coal and natural gas. However, fluctuating oil-prices, increasing VOC emissions, stringent government regulations and consumer awareness are creating a strong demand for incorporating sustainability into the life cycle of coatings.

This presentation will highlight some of the renewable raw materials, such as vegetable oils, cellulose, lignin, tannin, chitosan and proteins, which may be incorporated into coating formulations to lower the carbon footprint and process waste. Additionally, the incorporation of chemically modified lignin in high performance epoxy coatings and its performance in heavy-duty anticorrosion applications will be presented.
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Stainless steel is one of the most recyclable alloys. Due to the value of the scrap, it is collected as a valuable source of alloying elements (rather than dumped as waste), transported to the steel mill and melted once again for fresh steel to be made. Currently, most West European mills estimate that around 90% of their raw materials is scrap steel – a great way of saving minerals, preventing a lot of pollution from mining operations and at the same time we avoid stainless steel scrap polluting our nature. Recycling stainless steel is really a win-win-situation.

Aluminium alloys are seen as an alternative sustainable material for many applications due to its light weight and high recyclability with matching mechanical properties. Recycling and use of recycled aluminium alloys are most important order to obtain full potential of aluminium as a sustainable alternative material for a circular economy. From the point of view of engineering applications, use of recycled aluminium face lots of challenges, therefore its application needs to weigh against these challenges. This talk will cover the importance of light aluminium alloys today as a material of high efficiency, including recycling, and pros and cons, and then overview  some of the corrosion and surface engineering activities focusing on recycled aluminium for finding suitable solutions for efficient applications for example: automotive heat exchangers, anodizing etc.

Efficient power electronics is key to all tehnological sectors today as part of renewable energy, E-mobility, and information technology. Wide spread use of electronic systems leads exposure to varying humidity and temperature conditions. Regional variation of climatic conditions can cause uncontrolled local variation of humidity inside the device. Humidity variation together with number of other factors including the presence of hygroscopic residues on the Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) can cause permanent and intermittant failures modes.  Miniaturization for high density board is another factor contributing to this effect. Therefore it is important to protect electronics from climatic effect for efficient use. This talk will explain various protective measures that can be employed for providng sustainable performance.

The rapid transformation and optimization of the energy sector increase the complexity for prediction of corrosion effects. A powerful tool to restore control is monitoring of the actual performance, learning from data and thereby optimizing constructions and corrosion protection. The use of real time, remote monitoring of corrosion protection performance is a digitalized approach with a sustainable impact. For critical infrastructure difficult to access, such as buried gas transmission pipelines and offshore wind foundations, reliable data are obtained with less transport emissions, safer working conditions, and with the documentation needed to finetune the corrosion protection and reduce the use of resources instead of holding on to overconservative designs. Valid data is a key enabler for sustainable decisions.

Sustainability is an area more and more in focus in the offshore wind industry. The presentation focuses on ways of lowering the environmental impact of a project taking considerations over life cycle cost assessments into account.

An example of how offshore wind energy can also integrate solutions that support and enhance ocean biodiversity is the Re-Coral project. In the project Ørsted, together with Taiwanese partners, is planning a proof of concept this summer to support coral reefs by growing corals on offshore wind turbine foundations.

The automotive industry is not only working hard on the turnaround in drive technology, the use of sustainable products and consistent lightweight construction, it is also looking at sustainable paint technologies. In a holistic view of coating, different aspects have to be considered.

In this presentation, the three most important influencing factors will be discussed: The coating process, the curing process and the use of renewable raw materials in the coating formulation. Even if the paint only accounts for 0.3 wt.-% of the total mass of a car, a conventional paint shop is the main energy consumer at a production site. Therefore the coating and the process is an important factor in making the automotive industry more sustainable. At the same time the main functions of the paints like corrosion protection and the optical aspect must not be sacrified.

In the last few years businesses have been motivated and pushed by governments and global society on innovating and developing Green Business Models. However, Reconfiguring, designing and developing green business models to become more green and  efficient at the same time have shown to be much more complex than expected. The talk will give an insight on how future wireless technologies is expected to support better and more detailed measurements on green sustainability related to corrosion line of business model ecosystems – like car, windmill, steel business model ecosystem.