Metal-filled coatings/primers/seals containing anodic materials are engineered to provide sacrificial protection to the underlying metal by the same mechanism as Zn, Cd, etc. The substrate is protected by an alloy pigment in the polymer coating that is electrochemically more active (anodic) than the material to be protected. In recent years, metal-filled coatings have been gaining an increasing share of the aerospace and defense market, in large part because environmental restrictions both in the US and particularly in Europe are driving the aerospace and defense industry away from the use of toxic Cr6+-containing primers that.
As with other complex materials, metal filled coatings have been developed by an Edisonian approach, which can now be replaced by accurate computational modeling to optimize the design of the anodic particles and the polymer matrix optimum performance. We have developed a novel Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) model using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and a Discrete Element Method (DEM) to create a 3-D model of the metal-filled primer, that shows how it will interact electrochemically with the substrate and adjacent materials, allowing us to optimize it for different applications (corrosion control, wet install, gap filler, sealer, etc.).
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