This book covers
a broad range of materials science that has been brought to bear on providing
solutions to the challenges of developing self-healing and protective coatings
for a range of metals. The book has a strong emphasis on characterisation
techniques, particularly new techniques that are beginning to be used in the
coatings area. It features many contributions written by experts from various
industrial sectors which examine the needs of the sectors and the state of the
art.

The development
of self-healing and protective coatings has been an expanding field in recent
years and applies a lot of new knowledge gained from other fields as well as
other areas of materials science to the development of coatings. It has
borrowed from fields such as the food and pharmaceutical industries who have
used, polymer techniques, sol-gel science and colloidosome technology for a
range encapsulation techniques. It has also borrowed from fields like hydrogen
storage such as from the development of hierarchical and other materials based
on organic templating as “nanocontainers” for the delivery of inhibitors. In
materials science, recent developments in high throughput and other
characterisation techniques, such as those available from synchrotrons, are
being increasing used for novel characterisation – one only needs to look at
the application of these techniques in self healing polymers to gauge wealth of
new information that has been gained from these techniques.

This work is
largely driven by the need to replace environmental pollutants and hazardous
chemicals that represent risk to humans such as chromate inhibitors which are
still used in some applications.