A number of factors go into designing a successful corrosion prevention program. Choosing the right corrosion resistant coating is only one of them. Another, which will determine the longevity of a corrosion prevention system, is maintenance. You need to look at the specifics of your project: is there corrosion under insulation? What type of corrosion are you addressing? When the right industrial coating is chosen, and maintained, corrosion can successfully be stopped from damaging your asset. Corrosion services should be catered to your specific needs.

Selecting a Coating
Sacrificial and barrier coatings have been engineered to excel in specialized circumstances and to respond to a number of very specific environmental pressures. A project’s specification sheet should address any special circumstances surrounding an asset, including any extreme pressures it should expect to encounter and whether or not a corrosion resistant coating will need to account for.

Here’s where it may not be a bad idea to enlist the services of a NACE-certified coatings inspector to view an asset before it’s coated. This will help to determine what properties will be required from a coating, such as whether a highly corrosive environment will necessitate a urethane topcoat rather than an alkyd, for instance. The number of possible environmental stresses, and the coatings that could stand up to them, are numerous. That’s why it’s often a good idea to have a professional inspection before selecting a coating.

Once a generic coating type has been selected, it’s important to consider where the product comes from. Many manufacturers will cut corners on the way to producing what many qualify as an “epoxy primer” or a “polyurethane finish”. Inferior resins and cheap fillers and extenders are shortcuts that can yield a less expensive product at the expense of performance.

Having your asset examined by a coatings specialist beforehand will also help with that all-important second step in keeping corrosion at bay: a well thought out maintenance plan.

Coatings Maintenance
The worst possible time to discover your corrosion prevention system has let you down is when an asset fails. And protection from corrosion is, unfortunately, not a one-and-done process. The elements degrade. Chemicals erode. Moisture seeps in. These are realities as certain as death and taxes. But, with a coatings maintenance plan in place, regular wear over time needn’t be a significant setback.

A little spot coating as a part of a regular coatings maintenance plan can prevent the spread of localized corrosion and keep the need for a full-blown recoat years in the future.

And that’s not the most significant reason for having a maintenance plan in place. A full-scale failure as a result of damage caused by corrosion could be catastrophic. Leaking chemical pipelines and unsound structural steel threaten lives as well as financial stability. We’ve seen already how much corrosion costs the economy, and regular coating’s maintenance is a one of the best fundamental strategies we have for bringing those expenditures down. When corrosion is allowed to proceed to the point of taking an asset out of commission, that’s corrosion at its most expensive, not to mention its most dangerous.

Mike Reed is the General Manager of US Coatings.