CORROSION MAP OF AUSTRALIA RE-IMAGINED

Abstract

The ‘Corrosion Map of Australia’ (henceforth abbreviated to the ‘Map’) was originally conceived in the late 1990s at CSIRO’s Division of Building, Construction, and Engineering. The original iteration took as inputs actual corrosion data being collected up to then and embedded it into a newly developed Geographical Information System (GIS)-based program. To analyse locally for which historical data were unavailable, a long trek to model the causes & influences of corrosion was needed. The concept of the Holistic model of Corrosion came into being, which continues to be refined. The last iteration of the Map was available via the Industrial Galvanizers’ website several years ago. This paper describes work performed recently by RMIT University, the Galvanizers Association of Australia (‘GAA’), and CSIRO to produce a new Interactive Corrosion Map of Australia that will eventually be accessible via the GAA’s website. This ‘App’ will predict both the yearly corrosion rate and protected lifetimes of hot dipped galvanised components on different facades and in the envelope of buildings around the country. The ‘App’ is underpinned by the holistic model of corrosion which uses process models at different scales to predict and sum the incremental corrosion every three hours. The presentation will outline the App and its utility and the main features of the underlying models.