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Veteran Battelle Scientist Compiles Data and Observations on Atmospheric Corrosion

DoD Corrosion Office Releases Book-length Document to the Public at CorrDefense.org

By Cynthia Greenwood

A Decade of Corrosion Monitoring in the World’s Military Operating Environments: A Summary of Results William H. Abbott, a senior scientist who has worked at Battelle-Columbus for more than 40 years, has written a book-length document to aid researchers, engineers, and maintenance specialists focused on preventing corrosion on military weapon systems, including aircraft and related assets. The document is titled A Decade of Corrosion Monitoring in the World’s Military Operating Environments: A Summary of Results. The work compiles data and conclusions from the monitoring of corrosion in myriad atmospheric environments where military aircraft are deployed.

The Pentagon-based DoD Corrosion Office will publish copies of Abbott’s document and release it to the public on the CorrDefense Web site (www.corrdefense.org). According to Abbott’s foreword, the document "represents a unique collection of data intended to demonstrate the range of severity conditions that exist, the rates of degradation of selected materials in those environments, how those environments can be monitored, and how equipment can be protected to mitigate corrosive effects."

"The book-length document will be available in electronic form for whatever the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) decides to do with it," said Abbott. "There will be some hard-cover, bound versions available for specific purposes by the end of March 2008. None of this will be for sale."

The Foreword and Introduction to A Decade of Corrosion Monitoring in the World’s Military Operating Environments: A Summary of Results are reproduced here.

Foreword

This document was prepared at the request of the Office of The Secretary of Defense, Corrosion Program Office under subcontract to Battelle-Columbus from Mandaree Enterprise Corporation. The intent of the document is to summarize in one location much of the field corrosion monitoring studies conducted over more than a decade by the author while employed at Battelle-Columbus. It is not intended as a scientific treatise of corrosion. Rather, it represents data summaries, observations, and conclusions reached from many studies conducted in operational environments where U.S. military assets are being deployed worldwide. Therefore, it is believed to represent a unique collection of data intended to demonstrate the range of severity conditions that exist, the rates of degradation of selected materials in those environments, how those environments can be monitored, and how equipment can be protected to mitigate corrosive effects. Due to the nature of the studies and the intent of this document, no attempt has been made to conduct a comprehensive review of the prior literature or to acknowledge the work of others.

The opinions and conclusions reached in this document are largely those of the author. It is hoped that these results may help to serve the needs of others in the future in their quest to combat corrosion.

Introduction

Corrosion monitoring activities have been in progress by Battelle Columbus for more than a decade. This work was initiated in support of the U.S. Air Force Ageing Aircraft Program, the Air Force Corrosion Program Office, and in recent years through the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) corrosion program. This work has had as one objective—the characterization of military operating environments worldwide in terms of corrosive severity. Originally, this work was in support of maintenance actions such as aircraft wash cycles as governed by T.O. 1-1-691. Wash intervals are determined by the corrosive severity of the basing environments and historically have been grouped into categories of Mild, Moderate, and Severe environments with associated wash intervals of 120, 90, and 30 days respectively.

In many cases, these categories have been established on the basis of experience and/or perception rather than hard data. This approach had served the military well but in the late 1980ís an effort was started by the U.S. Air Force to refine these categories or at least support the definition of base severity from actual data. This started a long process which is continuing to the present—to provide such documentation based on long-term exposures of well-defined corrosion monitoring packages in the outdoor environments of military bases worldwide. This work, which began in a small way, has now spread across all of the Services and has led to the establishment of large databases that include corrosion rates of a variety of metals, in order to establish Environmental Severity Indices (ESI) values for military bases.

The work has been highly successful, in part because of the cooperation of various military and civilian personnel worldwide. Even though the determination of these ESI values has remained central to this work, there have been a number of related activities also conducted in the field environments. A partial list of these include 1) lapjoint corrosion, 2) corrosion modeling, 3) galvanic corrosion, 4) exfoliation, 5) Corrosion Prevention Compound (CPC) evaluation, 6) on-aircraft monitoring, 7) corrosion sensor development and applications to ground and aircraft monitoring, and 8) coatings evaluation. Through all of this diverse work there has been the consistent theme of developing new data from the field on the effects of real environments on materials and systems.

Much of these data have already been reported in technical papers and conference proceedings. However, recently a request was made by OSD to attempt to pull much of this information together in a single document. This is the purpose of this publication. It is designed to trace this interesting evolution of field studies over the last decade and place much of the data and conclusions that have been made about corrosion in the military operating environments in one source.