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>> My name is Jerry Curran, I'm a corrosion engineer
at the KSC Corrosion Technology Laboratory.
My two co-workers, Dr. Eliza Montgomery and Dr. Mark Kolody.
They also work with us here.
We're at the beachside atmospheric test site
and this is where we do all our outdoor real time testing.
This site was originally established
in late '60s, early '70s.
It started out with 300 foot long by 30 foot wide site here.
Over the years, it's been expanded twice.
Now we're 900 feet long.
So the reason we're here, the reason the site was established,
was to provide a testing site
for protective coatings for our launch pads.
And test and qualify coatings for NASA coating standard 5008.
So what we have in front
of us here is a typical standardized test.
And what we do, so we use two different types of panels.
We use what we call our composite panel,
they're all steel panels, but we have a one inch c channel welded
to the face of a steel panel.
And then we also use a flat panel,
a flat steel panel in our testing.
So, what the testing compromises of is we take a coating system,
a liquid coating system from a coating manufacturer
and we apply, we mix and apply here on site
and we prepare a set of primer-only panels.
And then we also prepare a set of primer mid coat,
top coat full system, full stack up coatings.
So we test them in both configurations.
And what we see here, this, this testing right here compromise,
consists of 10 different coating systems.
And you can see, so, I'll just number the
like 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 and the rest over here we'll see
in a minute, are the same coating systems.
So this is the primers, and then the primers top coats,
same, same systems.
So what you can see here is these panels have been
out here since August of 2012.
So this August will be four years of exposure
and you can see differences in performance of the coatings.
And what we're looking at here is we were looking
at non-zinc systems.
And you can tell from the video that we weren't very lucky in,
or successful in finding any.
The two systems that are actually performing well are
zinc systems.
All the rest of them are non-zinc.
This one is working well,
and as far as corrosion resistance goes,
but there were other issues
with the coating that's not working out so well.
So we can walk down and look at some of the other systems.
Okay, so this is the same coating systems
that we saw earlier.
But these coatings have the same primers as we saw.
But it has a mid-coat, top coat, or railroad system,
so a full stack up coating system.
So you can see the coating you saw before, they still match
up with system 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
These are the two zinc systems that were performing well
over there and the rest of the non-zinc systems
that were not doing very well,
primer or with the full stack-up system.
And of course, we still have the one non-zinc system
that was doing so well but had some other issues.
If we can look over here,
we have the same coating systems but on flat panels.
And what we do with flat panels is we actually intentionally
scribe these or damage the coating and see what happens.
So the two, the same layout, system 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
These are the two zinc systems
and the rest are non-zinc systems.
Basically, this is the panel coating configuration
for the NASA coatings qualification test.
What we do is we, these things are exposed out here
for 18 months, we look at them about every 6 months,
we do color and gloss measurements on them,
we do corrosion evaluations on them.
All the valuations are using ASTM standards
and they all have different numbers
and rating systems for the evaluations.
So, if they meet a certain requirement,
ACE 10 standard requirement number, after 18 months
of exposure, they get put
on our approved products list initially.
And then we leave them out here for up to five years
and they have to perform adequately the same
for the five-year period to remain on the list.
If they don't, then we remove them from the list.
>> We are about half a mile from one of the launch pads
and a mile away from Pad A and B.
And what we actually do here is we want to be sure
that we know our corrosion rate all the time.
So, because it does vary year to year.
And so we take these carbon steel panels and we put them
out every single month, pull them off after a year
so that we can get seasonal and corrosion rates.
And right here would be a panel that's off for a month and then
up here, this is going to be a panels that are on for a year.
So you can see there is a huge difference
in the condition of the panel.
So since 1997 we have had this weather station here
to continuously monitor all the weather conditions,
precipitation, temperature, relative humidity,
so that we understand what our weather conditions are and how
that relates to our corrosion rates out at the beach site.
And so what we also do here,
is we want to monitor the salt concentration coming off the
Atlantic Ocean.
So we have these wicks
and they're actually just cotton wicks.
And they're out here for one month, and we pull them off,
and so that also allows us
to get the seasonal chloride concentration
that we basically we're seeing on the panels every month.
And we relate that to the weather conditions,
the precipitation and also the corrosion rate we just
looked at.
>> So this is our Seawater Immersion site.
Seawater spray down test.
What you're looking at now is the seawater spray down test
that mimics ship board corrosion activities or any place
that you want to have sea water directly applied
to your experiments.
So we can set the timer to have these spray heads come
on in one-minute intervals throughout the hour.
So it gives you a wet-dry cycle.
And it's facing a southerly exposure
so you get the UV during the day and then you get the cyclic
of wet-dry and night and day exposures.
This is seawater immersion tank.
And right now we have an experiment
in there that's doing tidal exposure.
So the water rises and lowers to immerse your samples
in the water and then dry.
So it also does the wet dry-cycle.
And this can also be set on a timer.
Right now it's set on 2 hours wet and 2 hours dry.
So 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
>> I think one of the things I like most
about my job is being able
to help customers solve their problems.
If you look behind us, we have this solar panel array.
That customer came to us looking for corrosion protection
to their product, but they were also looking
at the efficiency of their product.
We were able to hook this up to the internet
so that they could get live data.
They can compare the actual data of their array to the model
that they had at their facility.
Many people assume that we only work for NASA but we also work
for Department of Defense as well as private industry
as in this case over here with the solar panels.
This is another example what we do to help people
with their everyday lives.
As you can see, these are car hoods, automobile hoods.
And this represents something else that we do.
We're trying to produce a product
or help a manufacturer produce a product.
Something that's going to last longer,
something that's going to be better.
In this case, these are automobile hoods.
Something that everybody owns or they will
at some point in their life.
We want it to last as long as possible.
We want it to look as good as long as possible.
And that's really one of the reasons we're here.
>> The best qualification and coatings process, we're looking
at coatings is this, is just this natural environment.
We're getting all the elements in one
because there's no calculation,
there's no model that's really going to be able to conclude all
of the environmental factors when you're looking
at corrosion coatings.
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