Corrosion is the natural deterioration that occurs with all materials and it affects nearly every industrial sector and government agency, along with having a direct impact on the economy, health, safety, infrastructure, environment and national security.
So it’s not surprising that industry professionals from Toyota Motor North America, Inc. and PinnacleART traveled to College Station to learn more about the degradation process and how to deal with its destructiveness in their own fields.
The National Corrosion and Materials Science Reliability Lab at Texas A&M University—in partnership with TEES EDGE, the professional and continuing education division of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES)—now offers a course that introduces industry professionals to the fundamentals of corrosion and the multiscale-level materials performance for corrosion engineering applications.
“TEES EDGE collaborates with TEES researchers to meet current industry needs by developing opportunities for professionals to explore, in a hands-on environment, applications resulting from our cutting-edge, engineering research,” said Melissa Walden, TEES EDGE director. “Dr. Homero Castaneda-Lopez and the Center for Infrastructure Renewal worked closely with leaders at Toyota and TEES EDGE to launch this high-quality short course with immediate benefits across the automotive and energy industries—benefits we hope extend beyond those enrolled in the course.”
On Dec. 11-13, the center presented the short course “Basic Corrosion: An Introduction to Thermodynamics and Kinetic Fundamentals” at the Center for Infrastructure Renewal. The course was led by Castaneda-Lopez, interim director of the Lab and associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M.
“The course is about corrosion basics. Why corrosion? Because they’re industry. Empirically they know that the phenomenon exists but they don’t know some fundamentals, some basics of why it’s happening. So the intention of the course is to first explain what is happening, then the fundamentals and then how to apply it to their fields.”
During the course, participants attended lectures and hands-on demonstrations on modern engineering tools necessary to understand the basic principles of materials electrochemistry and corrosion.
“It’s definitely been a great experience. We’ve been able to get into a lot of the details and background on some of the theory,” said Kory Koran, a Toyota engineer. “We’ve been able to discuss some of the real-world applications of those theories and got hands on experience working with some of the tools used to calculate corrosion mechanisms.”