Abstract
The United States Navy operates and maintains over 300 ships and submarines in a highly aggressive marine environment. The corrosion of ship structures and shipboard systems and components in this environment is one of the biggest contributors to the Navy’s maintenance costs. This paper will provide an overview of the marine environment as it affects naval vessel corrosion problems, and provide several examples of major corrosion cost drivers according to a hierarchical work breakdown structure of ship structures and functional systems. The maintenance documentation and data collection processes at the organizational, intermediate and depot levels will be presented, along with an assessment of their ability to be used to identify and extract material, labor, and incidental costs associated with corrosion prevention and repair. This overview will discuss the difficulties in gathering corrosion data and in the use of existing data for determining the cost of corrosion. A quantitative measure of the cost of ship corrosion to the Navy must be based on the extrapolation of limited data qualitatively derived and assessed by knowledgeable corrosion engineers in conjunction with Fleet maintenance personnel. A methodology that has been successfully demonstrated for addressing corrosion costs based on limited quantitative input from the naval maintenance community will be presented.
