ARC Discovery Projects funding success

Wednesday, 4 November 2015

Professor Rob Melchers and Dr Robert Jeffrey have been awarded $690,000 in ARC Discovery Project funding commencing in 2016 for their research project Long-term corrosion of offshore steel structures in near-stagnant seawater.

Australian Research Council (ARC)

This project investigates the seawater corrosion of structural steels under near-stagnant and possibly polluted conditions. Better understanding of long-term corrosion of structural steels in near-stagnant seawaters is needed to predict the safety of steel offshore structures such as the pods supporting wind and wave energy generators. Also, the expensive maintenance of protective coatings and systems could be obviated or reduced if corrosion remains acceptable. This project plans to investigate experimentally the temporal development and stochastic nature of general corrosion and pitting for steels under actual near-stagnant seawater conditions. It also plans to build mathematical-probabilistic models for corrosion prediction, calibrated to field data. These models will include allowance for microbiological corrosion effects, important under anthropological pollution.

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