On 24 April, Corrosion Awareness Day is celebrated around the world in order to raise public awareness of a factor that has an enormous financial and safety impact. To give an idea of the scale of the problem, it is sufficient to say that each year corrosion is estimated to cause a loss of more than 2.5 billion US dollars worldwide, according to NACE data. This means that every few seconds 5 tons of steel are disintegrating, the equivalent of approximately 4 average weight cars.

In nature, metals occur in their oxidised state, mainly as oxide or sulphide minerals. The processing of metals from minerals requires a significant amount of energy to transform the ore into pure metal and, as a result, their thermodynamic inclination is to spontaneously return to their natural state: they corrode.

With only a few exceptions, the corrosion of metal is due to an irreversible reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction between the metal and an oxidising agent present in the surrounding environment. For this reason, corrosion can be defined as the set of physical-chemical phenomena by which the surface of a metal is attacked by the most diverse chemical agents. It is usually a natural and spontaneous process, the direct and indirect effects of which affect millions of people and limit the useful life of a variety of objects and equipment

Corrosion control and prevention, together with surface technology, are therefore of crucial importance for a technology-based society. One of the great challenges is to find innovative solutions, not only to prevent corrosion but also to take advantage of its positive aspects.

At CIDETEC we support the raising of awareness of what corrosion implies and we take part in the initiatives carried out on this day. To this end, on 19 June, the Seminar "Electrochemical methods for characterising and evaluating corrosion" will be held at the CIDETEC Surface Engineering premises in collaboration with GOMENSORO-METROHM.