It is the mindset that can be observed in industry quite frequently and it has the potential of being lethal.3 Corrosion and Aging: Aging implies that a structure has been in service for quite a long time, whereas corrosion can actually occur in structures right after being put into service. Therefore, corrosion‐related failures could happen in structures after a relatively short period of service (sometimes months).
In our professional judgment, management of corrosion needs to address all aspects of corrosion as we have tried to do in this book; corrosion and the algorithm of innovation (TRIZ; the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) have been covered to the required extent in Chapters 2 and 6. In Chapter 2, some important aspects of corrosion science is re‐defined, that is, as much as needed. The engineers looking after corrosion issues may not themselves have attended pre‐employment corrosion courses, and thus during their employment years they attend courses or conferences with specific titles, or even learn from each other and/or their colleagues verbally. There is a very small minority who, with a pre‐employment background in corrosion, still keep their knowledge up to date. This author during his more than two decades of consulting, as well as education training courses, has seen these issues very clearly.
The executive force for any management of corrosion scheme is humans and not robots, although we often forget this. Along with it, we also happen to forget the golden wisdom “To err is human.” In fact, a great number of industrial disasters—including those related to corrosion—stem from human error. One of the ways by which human error can be highly decreased is via training. In IMPACT report by AMPP, the cost for training is not mentioned as cost but as investment. Creating motivation and paying special attention to training is of paramount significance in a corrosion knowledge management (CKM) scheme, and is an integral part of smart management of corrosion. In addition to the science of corrosion, it is important to find the best way to invent solutions. With decades of splendid past, TRIZ can be an instrumental factor in creating innovation patterns. This author has shown the application power of TRIZ in some of his publications. Researchers need to be familiar with TRIZ to find better solutions which are innovative and feasible particularly in the field of management of corrosion.
The heart of this book which is Smart Management of corrosion is the topic of Chapter 3. Engineering aspects of corrosion is explained in Chapter 5. No matter what our interpretation about management of corrosion, understanding corrosion in action is a must.
Discussing enough about economics as required to define corrosion damage is addressed in Chapter 4, whereas environmental effects of corrosion has been addressed in Chapter 7.
This book is highly likely to experience a “Semmelweis Reflex” which essentially means “to stick to preexisting beliefs and to reject fresh ideas that contradict them [2]. No literature of CM known to us issues such details of economy, environment, TRIZ, and innovative interpretation of CM as we will cover in this text.
References
1 1 Aquinas, P.G. (2011). Principles and Practices of Management. Phagwara, India: Lovely Professional University.
2 2 Gupta, V. K., Saini, C., Oberoi, M. et al. (2020) “Semmelweis Reflex: An Age‐Old Prejudice,” World Neurosurgery. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31837492, last visited 13 February 2021.
Notes
1 1 Please study Chapter 3 for a better understanding of these terms.
2 2 The metallic path when referred to corrosion under real life conditions has no meaning because corrosion already is taking place on metals.
3 3 https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Sen‐Tom‐Coburn‐Americas‐Fiscal‐Defense‐Crisis‐06412, last visited 15 February 2021.
4 4 Corrosion prevention and corrosion control are not the same and cannot be used interchangeably. We will get back to this concept later in this book.
2 A Short Review of Some Important Aspects of the Science of Corrosion
Reza Javaherdashti1∗ and Ali Ghanbarzadeh2†
1 General Manager, Eninco Engineering B.V., The Netherlands
2 Research at RIPI (Research Institute of Petroleum), I.R. Iran
2.1 Introduction
Corrosion is a process that happens naturally. The way corrosion happens is a story that has been repeated in all books written on the subject, but it will still make sense if we repeat it here. The main reason for doing so is that the thermodynamics behind corrosion is not only important from a scientific/engineering point of view, but also from a corrosion management (CM) approach. (We have described the significance of the thermodynamic nature of corrosion and how it is important in engineering practices, and particularly CM and management of corrosion in Chapter 3.)
Corrosion is derived from a Greek word that may be translated as “bitten away.” Some authors—including us—justify this word by implying that a corroded part seems to have been bitten. The invisible bite probably comes from the very nature of the metal because metals are not found in their pure form—that is without having oxides, sulfates, carbonates, and the like—in their natural form. Even what we call iron (that originally means “coming from heaven” probably due to it being mainly found in meteors) is not naturally found as a totally pure material free of non‐metallic materials. Metals such as iron, copper, and the like are always found in their ores. Ore is a rock part that contains these metals as compounds and not elements. These rocks are extracted and crushed and the metallic compounds within them are then extracted. The second and the most important stage from a corrosion point of view, however, is the extraction of metal from the “surrounding” non‐metallic compounds around it. The core process in metal extraction is the reduction processes during which electrons are added to electrons already existing in the metal element itself. These reduction processes, collectively referred to as “extraction metallurgy processes” are basically those happening in metallurgy plants. It is by these processes that metals with high purity are being produced.
In this sense, the pure metal is not at rest when compared to its state when it was in its ore. In other words, the state of energy in two stages of “in‐ore” and “as‐extracted” will be far different from each other; Gibbs free energy of “in‐ore” is much lower than that of “as‐extracted.” This means that any way by which this excess of energy can be released will
