High Temperature Corrosion in Aggressive Environments

High temperature corrosion causes problems in chemical and petrochemical industry, in metallurgical processes and heat treatments and in power plants. Failures are occuring not too frequently, but can cause devastating damages and severe financial losses, due to shut down of large units plants. This book describes the occurrence and appearance of high temperature corrosion failures caused by carburization, metal dusting, nitridation, sulfidation, chloridation and/or oxidation. These corrosion phenomena, caused by carbon, nitrogen, sulfur or chloride are in practice more deleterious than oxidation, which for most usual high temperature alloys should lead to protective oxide scales. Oxidation is described in other textbooks in great depth and detail, but this book emphasizes the other manifold phenomena. Failure cases will be described for which the elucidation, sometimes requested kind of detective work.Research on high temperature corrosions must be versatile, numerous methods areapplied to elucidate the kinetics and to analyse the reaction products. But there is also a wide scientific background, fundamental knowledge in thermodynamics, kinetics of gas-metal interactions and diffusion, and of solid state chemistry is necessary to fully understandthe mechanisms and reasons of the high temperature corrosion attack. These fundamentals will be presented for the corrosion phenomena mentioned above, and the mechanisms will be described as attained in the last 30 years, by research at the Max-Planck-Institut for Iron Research, in many joint projects with other institutions in Europe, but also considering the research by many other groups all over the world. This presentation will help many scientists, engineers and students to understand the high temperature corrosion problems and mechanisms. But also upcoming challenges, especially in power plants, generating energy from incineration of waste or biomass, and from syngas produced by coal gasification, these arethe most