It is by now a well recognized fact that corrosion causes costs of considerable magnitude for modern industrial societies. For example, in a recent report, the National Bureau of Standards and the Battelle Columbus Laboratories estimate that the total annual cost of corrosion to the United States is about $70 billion, or 4% of the Gross National Product, and that $10 billion of this total cost, or about 0.6% of the GNP, could be avoided by the use of presently available corrosion control technology. This is only the latest of a relatively long line of such studies, most notable of which was the Hoar Report, and which includes studies in the USSR, West Germany, Finland and Sweden, India, Australia and Japan, as well as the early work of Uhlig.
What is remarkable about all these studies is that, when allowances are made for differences in methodology, definitions, and the necessarily...
