Significance of consulting business for corrosion problems has not been well recognized in Japan. It is much dependent on the difficulty of the value evaluation in the corrosion problems. It seems that business custom to utilize consultants is not well established. However, the potential expectation to corrosion specialists should be high because of the particular technology field. The past experience as a corrosion consultant is described in the report.

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Corrosion consultants, who do not belong to any companies of maker, user, or fabricator, have been expected to play an active part in the corrosion engineering field in Japan, similar to advanced industrial countries. The situations are resulted from the decreased engineering personnel in the companies, because of the increased retirement of the baby-boomer generations after the World War II. The author’s activities as the corrosion consultant for 8 years are shown for introducing the real circumstances around the consultant business in this field.

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In this paper, the emphasis is placed upon the several problems in regard to technical consulting on corrosion-protection in local region such as shortage of consultants, economical problems, problems due to the variety of corrosion troubles and existence of half trained consultants. The importance of the distribution of information on corrosion engineering is also pointed out.

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Ten years have already passed since the author began dealing with consultation of corrosion and corrosion prevention technology. At the beginning of the business, the author’s replies against corrosion problems were solely based on his experience in corrosion of chemical plants. The answers were also not so quick to customers, and sometimes lack of reasonable evidence coming from field tests.
On the hand, the author often met with difficulties in dealing with unfamiliar corrosion problems except for those of chemical plants, therefore making efforts to collaborate with specialists in different types of corrosion. Realizing that the field tests and network were crucial for consulting business, the author paid much attention to undertaking business with the help of chemical and instrumental analysis and interchange among corrosion specialists. This paper describes the way to success concerning corrosion and corrosion prevention consulting business.

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Materials and Environments Laboratory Inc. is the 7th company among 36 venture businesses born from Hiroshima University. Its concept and business plan were conceived while the author was working as a professor of the university. Its main job is corrosion and protection consultation based on experience and intelligence of corrosion engineering. It was established in May, 2002 under the advisory help from six professors of four universities.
The company has its own management concept :
1. Do best for the client companies.
2. Sincere consultation and no rejection of any corrosion related problems, therefore, covering wide ranges of corrosion patterns and metallic materials.
3. Make efforts for developing its own corrosion monitoring system and technique.
Many pleasures induce us in doing our consultation business :
1) Contribution not only domestically but also abroad in corrosion consultation and education of corrosion engineering etc.
2) Challenge the world first production system with knowledge of corrosion, e.g. decomposing organic chloride wastes in the sub-critical condition.
3) No age barrier in doing jobs. While we can give appropriate consultation service to customers, we will be able to continue our job without any consideration of aging.
4) Dream of developing a new technology with our client companies.

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Severe localized corrosion of steel pipes buried in concrete/soil systems (known as macro-cell corrosion) is induced by cathodic reactions on those steel surfaces that are located in the concrete, accompanied by anodic reactions (i.e., corrosion) on those surfaces that are located in the soil. The addition of cathodic inhibitors to the concrete in the form of concrete admixtures is therefore expected to be an effective means of suppressing this phenomenon. Uric acid, NTMP, and 5-aminouracil were selected as candidate materials for the cathodic inhibitors, and were appended to concrete test pieces (water/cement ratio : 61%). Measurements of the currents flowing between steel (SGP) pipe test specimens embedded in concrete test pieces and pipes buried in soil (electrically connected to the steel pipe test specimens in the concrete) were performed in order to evaluate the inhibitory effects over a period of 116 days. The currents were decreased by the addition of uric acid (dry mixed in a ratio of 1 : 10 by weight with ordinary Portland cement), which shows that macro-cell corrosion can be effectively controlled by uric acid. The other compounds were not effective.

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