High-temperature corrosion is one of the most important issues for materials selection, structure design and service life prediction of engineering parts used in high-temperature environments. In general, the formation of corrosion products leads to the loss of materials, decreases the reliability and stability, and ultimately shortens the service lifetime of engineering components. It is therefore important to develop high temperature corrosion-resistant materials.
Corrosion-resistant high-temperature materials are essential for many important industries, such as electric power generating plants, aerospace, gas turbines, heat-treating, chemical process industries, and mineral and metallurgical processing operated at high temperatures. In practice, most high-temperature materials are designed to form a slow-growing protective oxide scale, such as chromia, alumina or silica. The degradation resistance of a high-temperature material depends on sustaining the formation of this protective scale and stabilising it against mechanical damage and attack by gas species.
The high-temperature corrosion research at UNSW is focused on the understanding of the alloy-gas reactions in corrosion processes, the prediction of reaction products and kinetics as a function of temperature and the compositions of both alloy and gas, and finally the development of corrosion-resistant high-temperature alloys for high-temperature application.
Major research areas include:
- oxidation of metals
- metal carburisation and metal dusting
- CO2 corrosion of Fe-base and Ni-base alloys
- coal ash corrosion in CO2-rich gas atmospheres
- corrosion in waste to energy process
- hot corrosion.
The group is internationally recognised for its high-temperature corrosion research, and is the only group in Australia carrying out this nationally significant work. Research on high-temperature alloy corrosion has been conducted at UNSW for many decades. It has enjoyed successful collaborations with international research institutes, universities and industries, including Oak Ridge National Lab, USA; Exxon Mobil, USA; CIRIMAT-ENSIACET, France; Forschungszentrum, Juelich, Germany; High Temperature Materials Research Group, DECHEMA, Germany; Institute of Metal Research (IMR) and Northeastern University, China.
