Supervisors: Prof. Ivan Cole (RMIT) and Dr. Michael Rohwerder (MPIE) and Dr. Patrick Keil (BASF)
Project 1: Self-Healing organic coatings: the delaminated interface
In self-healing coatings, the self-healing will take a while to set in. During this time the coating will continue to delaminate. That requires that it will have to be restored in its functions of inhibiting corrosion and providing strong adhesion between coating and metallic substrate. It is proposed to carry out a dedicated project focussing at this interface in order to provide both a better general understanding as well as approaches how to obtain optimized self-healing. MPIE is ideally equipped to tackle this important problem, that has been widely neglected so far.
Project 2: Re-enforcing the protection of zinc oxides via novel inhibitors
Traditionally zinc and galvanised steel have been protected by inhibitors within coatings surface will have a thin oxide layer. However, in designing the inhibitor system the oxide layer is not considered a design variable. Here, it is proposed to look in how far the oxides can be tuned to perform better, ideally in combination with inhibitors. A suitably porous structure could act as a reservoir for the inhibitor and be used to seal any defect that develop in the compact layer while promoting densification of the porous layer and being available for migration to larger scale defects.
Project 3: Active protective coatings utilizing carrier-release concepts
Smart engineering materials capable to mimic sense-release properties are commonly found among living organisms and of rapidly raising interest for designing protective coatings. The project proposes a comparative study of suitable carrier-release concepts regarding different triggers and release kinetics of the stored corrosion inhibitors. Such protective coatings could have different protective mechanisms, like the release of corrosion inhibitors into a defect or stabilisation of the coating/substrate interface. Ideally both mechanisms will facilitate to a durable protective coating.
