Page 25 - Corrosion Engineering Principles and Practice

8 C h a p t e r 1 T h e S t u d y o f C o r r o s i o n 9

A corrosion engineer is often the member of a team with expertise in
chemical and materials engineering, failure analysis, electrochemistry,
biochemistry, and applied microbiology. In a large organization, the
primary function of the corrosion team would be to ensure that adequate
corrosion prevention and control requirements are being implemented
during all phases of procurement and operations. The corrosion team
would also be responsible for ensuring that relevant program documents
are prepared and submitted in accordance with acquisition requirements
and schedule. The work of a corrosion engineer may bring him into
frequent contact with responsible people in many of the branches of
his organization:

• With the engineering staff to work out new designs or modify
existing ones in order to reduce the opportunity for corrosion.
• With the maintenance engineers so that corrosion problems
and their probable causes are ascertained in order to cope
with them by making repairs or avoid them altogether
through preventive maintenance.
• With the production department to recognize their particular
requirements and needs for improvement in order to increase
the reliability and safe usage of equipment prone to be
affected by corrosion.
• With the accounting department to establish the actual cost of
corrosion in each case and the savings that may be expected
by reducing losses from this source.
• With the purchasing department to advise on the choice of
materials, to work out appropriate specifications and quality
control for materials, equipment, and fabrication procedures.
• With the sales department to discover any deficiencies of the
product that might be corrected by a better corrosion control
and demonstrate the sales value of the improvements
resulting from any corrective measure.
• With management to keep them abreast of particular needs
and accomplishments in order to receive the support required
to be fully effective in fighting corrosion.

As Francis L. LaQue pointed out in a paper published in 1952 and
rerun in the August 1985 issue of Materials Performance, a corrosion
engineer is for many organizations an engineer trained to recognize
the nature of corrosion and understand the mechanics of corrosion
processes [4]. With this knowledge, the corrosion engineer can make
a faster and more accurate diagnosis or analysis of any corrosion
related problem and be in a much better position to reason from one
experience to another, appraise the information presented, plan
research to uncover new information, and interpret and apply results
of investigations when they have been completed.