The Corrosion Engineers Education

I have found that corrosion is more the result of chemical and electrochemical interactions with the service environment than necessarily with the materials selected. The materials engineers 1 have worked with have an outstanding understanding of the manufacture of alloys, but not necessarily a good understanding of the effects of chemical attack and degradation on materials post-manufacture. 

Most metallurgical programs do not include electrochemistry, a must for a corrosion engineer. Chemical Engineers with some metallurgy classes would likely be the best equipped directly out of school. 

Understanding fundamental origins of corrosion, the electrochemical basis for much of it as well as how and why standard tests are designed is critical. Encyclopedic knowledge of facts available in databases is of less importance. 

Corrosion cost studies of various forms and importance have since been undertaken by several countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Kuwait, Germany, Finland, Sweden, India, and China [6]. A common finding of these studies has been that the annual corrosion costs range from approximately 1 to 5 percent of the GNP of each nation. Several studies separated the total corrosion costs into two parts  

The portion of the total corrosion cost that could be avoided if better corrosion control practices were used. 

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