Performance Testing of Marine Coatings: New Test and Evaluation Procedures.

摘要

Because of environmental and health restrictions on conventional marine coatings, there is an urgent need for reliable short-term procedures to evaluate performance and durability of coatings for ship tank exteriors and other exposed surfaces in marine environments. Currently used methods are considered inadequate. Long-term immersion or outdoor tests, though generally reliable, are much too time-consuming for today's regulatory timetable. Commonly used accelerated test methods produce results in a short time frame (1- 4 months) but have been shown to give poor reproducibility and poor predication of long-term service performance. Accordingly, the current project was undertaken by the National Shipbuilding Research Program, with the primary objective to develop test procedures that can better predict performance lifetime and susceptibility to early failures of marine coatings.