The purpose of the protective coating selection help-desk is to aid professional coating users and specifiers to select a coating suitable for a specific purpose. For protective coatings, this purpose is mainly the protection of structural steel against degradation (corrosion) caused by the exposure to their specific environment.
The information required is mainly to provide an answer to the basic question: �What is needed to provide a high quality coating cost effectively, safely in an environmentally acceptable manner for a given application and/or operation condition?�
The requirements of the application areas of coatings in the basic categories such as wear, corrosion, optical, decorative etc. will be listed. The fundamental requirements related to selection of coating/base material, pre-treatment methods, coating preparation will be assorted to make a list of parameters that include the most important parameters.
In addition to these technical requirements, special effort is needed to define the parameters of coatings related to the complete product process including the R&D, productivity (joining, forming etc.), production safety, recycling, and costs.
The main input to the parameters required are product information, standards, project reports, publications and to some extent case studies of various coatings research projects and failure analysis.