With employees’ lives and a company’s costs on the line, it’s imperative for engineers to design offshore and floating structures with materials that can withstand the hazardous environment of the ocean. But there is more to keep in mind than the constant beating of the waves.
Corrosion, for example, causes materials to weaken and decompose, eating away at them until they give way and deform or completely deteriorate. And in the saline-rich waters of the sea, corrosion is an engineer’s enemy.
To help combat this, Marcelo Paredes, assistant professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M University at Galveston, has been working on materials modeling – especially for engineering materials widely used by automotive, offshore and nuclear industries – and researching how corrosion affects high entropy alloys (HEAs).
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