Liberty Intercept Blog

Liberty Intercept is planning our biennial appearance as an exhibitor at EASTEC 2017 at the Eastern States Expo facility (home of The Big E) in Springfield, MA, May 16 - 18. Sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), EASTEC is the East Coast's premier manufacturing trade show. We invite you to be our guest!

If you Google the phrase “what can we use robots for”, the first explanation that pops up is this one, from a children’s show called “Science Trek” on Idaho Public Television:

“Most robots today are used to do repetitive actions or jobs considered too dangerous for humans. A robot is ideal for going into a building that has a possible bomb. Robots are also used in factories to build things like cars, candy bars, and electronics.”

This is sixth in a series on Corrosion Control. Find the previous articles here.

After talking about cathodic protection, and specifically some of the more complex impressed current cathodic protection systems, we now come to seemingly the most boring of the subsections of corrosion control: materials selection. However mundane choosing materials may seem (or may even actually be), it is, in fact, the most important factor in corrosion control. To be sure, there is an entire universe of materials selection for corrosion control. Several (possibly leather-bound) books have tried to illuminate areas of common concern, the most comprehensive being ASM International's Materials Selection for Corrosion Control by S.L. Chawla and R.K. Gupta. Although in the 24 years since that book was published, not only has the science of corrosion control developed, but the number of materials from which to select has also grown. An update may be needed, but this article shall not suffice for that job, it shall merely overview the subject.

  We're fascinated with the possibilities implicated by the rapid development of faster, cheaper, 
more efficient 3D printers. 3D printing had its advent in 1983, with a printer invented by Chuck Hull called a stereolithographer (SL or SLA), that used UV-curable liquids as its media.

This is fifth in a series on corrosion control; find the other posts here.

Corrosion inhibitors is a bit of an unfortunate term. One could rightly suggest that the entirety of corrosion control is focused on inhibiting corrosion, so any technique used within that umbrella could be called a corrosion inhibitor. Within the corrosion industry (yes, it is a proper industry), corrosion inhibitor refers to chemicals which are applied in low concentration, and which act in one or more of three ways:

Since the evolution of the homo sapiens brain, individuals blessed with such a biological marvel have attempted to extract fundamental building blocks from the natural world in order to build tools with which to shape that world. Of course humans are not the only animals capable of making tools from the surrounding environment. That behavior has been observed even in crows (with that in mind I suggest we all be nicer to the crows; if Hitchcock's The Birds is going to happen, the crows will certainly be the organizers, and they might have cleverer plans than just poking our eyes out). But because of that particularly adept and curious brain, humans throughout history have delved ever deeper into what the fundamental building blocks of nature are, along the way developing new techniques and altogether new concepts for tools.

In a report by market research firm “Markets and Markets”, it is projected that the flexible packaging industry will have an over 5% annual growth rate, to exceed $125 billion by 2021. In 2016 the market was at $98 billion. Packaging is considered flexible packaging if its shape can be easily changed, and includes any one or a combination of: paper, plastic, film, foil, metalized or coated papers.

The air quality in industrial China has been under scrutiny for some time. Early in 2016, China's environmental ministry announced that just 8 of the country's 74 largest cities passed the government's basic air quality standards in 2014. 

Beijing and other Chinese cities are choking under a blanket of smog. It’s so thick in Tianjin that at times, planes can’t land. In December, authorities issued the first “red alert” of 2016, and 1,200 Beijing-area factories were instructed to reduce production or shut down operations temporarily, in an effort to reduce air pollution, according press reports.

Corrosion is one of the most underestimated and often misunderstood forces humans deal with on a daily basis. A large part of that underestimation is the image in many people's minds of what corrosion is.  We tend to think and talk about corrosion similar to erosion: it's a geological time-scale force with which humans not only needn't engage but indeed shouldn't even concern ourselves, as it would be a futile waste of time and energy. Such a submissive attitude toward the natural forces may serve as a satisfactory spiritual practice, but to the discerning member of any competitive economic system, it is simply untenable. While the idea of battling corrosion may then conjure an image of poor Sisyphus and his infinite boulder displacement task, corrosion control can be done effectively and without anguish, as we've seen in our series of posts on the subject. Of course images and possibilities are interesting, but only hard data will tell the real story.

This is fourth in a series on corrosion control; find the previous posts here.

Within the world of corrosion control, coatings can include a number of different materials and processes, from paints to plating, to enamel and even bio films. Functionally, however, corrosion control coatings are not so different; they mainly serve one or both of two purposes: physical barrier and sacrificial anode. In order to function as a physical barrier, a material must simply prevent the chemicals which cause corrosion, i.e. water, and oxidizers like oxygen, chlorides or sulfur compounds, from touching the metal being protected. We'll see in a moment how difficult this can be.