High temperature corrosion in practical systems

There is a wide range of engineering systems where either the efficiency, the cost, or the reliability and lifetime is limited by high temperature corrosion processes. This includes gas turbines, boilers of various kinds, coal gasifiers, reformers and catalytic regenerators in the petrochemical industry, and heat exchangers and heat recovery systems of many kinds. The issues can largely be separated into oxidation and exfoliation, mixed oxidant attack, molten salt accelerated corrosion, and the effect of corrosion on the mechanical properties of the system. The base situation is that a stable protective oxide would normally be formed, and this would be adequate: the role of the other factors is to damage the protective oxide or inhibit its formation. Several practical situations will be described in terms of the processes outlined above.