New gasket materials

Purpose and goal

The goal for the project was to demonstrate that a gasket material with tailored properties can prevent crevice corrosion of stainless steels. The selected gasket material should also be suitable for industrial production and use. At testing of a candidate material during a longer period in realistic environment, crevice corrosion still occured under some conditions. Probably the candidate material was too soft and the creep properties were not sufficient.

Expected results and effects

There has been no indications that the basic principle should not work. The desired effect could be demonstrated i short term experiments. At long term testing, with usual test parameters, crevice corrosion occured on one (1) of a total of 10 samples and that after 80 days of exposure. When higher pressure was applied to the crevice assembly, two (2) of five samples suffered crevice corrosion. With conventional gasket materials, crevice corrosion would be expected for all tested samples.

Planned approach and implementation

Testing dominated the experimental work. Development of methods to modify the surface properties of conventional gasket materials came second because of the resources that would demand.