Robert Moser, a Ph.D. student in civil engineering, was awarded 2nd place in the corrosion engineering poster session at NACE's CORROSION 2011 in Houston, Texas. As part of the award, Robert was also
invited to present his work at a committee meeting. His poster entitled "Investigation of High-strength Stainless Steels for Prestressed Concrete Structures" highlights his work involving the development and evaluation of stainless steel prestressing strands for use in coastal bridge construction.
Robert is co-advised by Drs. Larry Kahn and Kimberly Kurtis in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Dr. Preet Singh in Materials Science Engineering. His research has compared the corrosion performance of a variety of candidate stainless steels, demonstrating that two duplex stainless steels exhibit superior performance to other stainless steels more commonly used in civil applications. Robert and his advisors are currently working with manufacturers to produce wires and prestressing strand from these metals, and they anticipate that these will be used in coastal construction in Georgia in the near future.
Professor Kurtis states, "Robert has done an excellent job integrating his microstructural, mechanical and corrosion studies, producing results with real impact, in terms of fundamental understanding of corrosion behavior but also with important practical implications. With these new and more corrosion-resistant steels strands, bridges can be constructed with 100-year (or longer) anticipated service lives. This represents a big step forward in our ability to design the next generation of civil infrastructure."
NACE International was originally established in 1943 as the National Association of Corrosion Engineers. With more than 60 years of experience in developing corrosion prevention and control standards, NACE International has become the largest organization in the world committed to the study of corrosion.