Report outlines a route to tackling corrosion
A new report from the Royal Society of Chemistry – put together by a diverse group of experts – identifies the next steps needed to enable businesses to adopt non-metallics as an alternative to corroding metals.
Corrosion of metals affects most of the world around us – from rail to aerospace, and from batteries to wind turbines. This costs the global economy £1.9 trillion per year – it is not sustainable to keep protecting, repairing and replacing corroding metals.
Sustainable, non-metallic materials could present a non-corroding alternative to traditional materials like steel, bringing major benefits to industry and the global economy. However, adopting these materials is a multi-faceted long-term challenge too complex and risky for any single organisation to solve alone. Before businesses can adopt non-metallics, they need a high level of confidence in how these materials will perform throughout their lifetime.
Tackling a challenge of this nature requires collaboration across the supply chain, multidisciplinary research and development efforts, and appropriate policies and regulations to enable the new materials to be adopted.
Last year, the Royal Society of Chemistry brought together a diverse group of experts representing independent and governmental technology organisations and multiple industries and sectors, to share knowledge and begin to tackle this challenge. This formed part of Synergy, our programme for UK businesses who want to tackle complex chemistry topics collaboratively.
The findings of this group have now been published in a new report.
The report discusses reasons that industry may wish to adopt sustainable non-metallics in the future. These drivers include public perception and environmental awareness, future regulatory changes, climate change, business requirements, and advancements in key technologies.
As well as the trends influencing innovation in this topic, the report also outlines the technical challenges and potential gaps in existing knowledge. It identifies specific opportunities for cross-industry collaboration, and lists five key areas that will be important for enabling collaboration.
Our planet faces critical challenges, and at the Royal Society of Chemistry we are uniquely placed to bring together the right people with the right expertise to tackle these challenges. We are particularly proud of our Synergy programme, which places collaboration at the heart of solving key issues facing not only industry but the world as a whole.
In the past year the Synergy programme has been exploring new ways for the chemistry community to tackle corrosion, a multi-sector problem affecting everything from buildings and infrastructure to oil and gas pipelines and manufacturing. Non-metallics could present a sustainable solution to this problem as an alternative to metals, which are highly susceptible to corrosion. Chemistry has a great deal to offer in this area – helping to improve the performance of non-metallics and enabling many industries to adopt these materials.
This report is the output of recent workshops that brought together experts from industry and academia. I am proud to be able to share this report with the wider community, with the aim of sparking further development in this crucial area.
Send us an email to find out more about our latest report or give us feedback.
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