Advances in corrosion protection by organic coatings (ACPOC)

Some exciting developments have been aired at these conferences over the years – your correspondent remembers at the 1989 conference hearing (for the first time) in a paper delivered by Brian Skerry about the 3-electrode electrochemical noise technique to examine anticorrosive coatings, and in recent years that technique has proved the dominant one in your correspondent’s investigations. This series of conferences actually has a history before 1989. Four previous ones took place in USA. These were held at Lehigh University (in 1978 and 1980) in Philadelphia (1984) and in San Diego (1986) and had all been organised by Henry Leidheiser with the involvement of Martin Kendig (again, on a personal note, the strong encouragement received from Henry to present some of my PhD work at the 1980 conference was instrumental in getting me back into working on anticorrosive paints, a field which I have remained in on and off for the last quarter of a century). The latter was also involved in the first two Christ’s College conferences and helped secure publication of the conference proceedings as special proceedings volumes of the Electrochemical Society (the first two at Lehigh had been specific volumes published by NACE and the one in Philadelphia was published in a special issue the journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry). There was also an extra ACPOC in 1997 held in Tokyo, Japan, organised by Sekine, Scantlebury and Kendig where the proceedings were again published by the Electrochemical Society. The previous Cambridge conference in 1999 was published in the web based journal operated by UMIST (now University of Manchester) J. Corros. Sci. Eng. (JCSE). The papers from this conference will be published similarly. Your correspondent has been lucky enough to be able to attend seven of the nine ACPOC meetings held so far (missing only those held in 1978 and 1986). In fact, he has reported for Br. Corros. J. (now Corros. Eng. Sci. Technol.) on all the ones since 1989. This time there were around 45 delegates. Although due to the data protection act no list of delegates was released most of those who came gave papers. In the absence of Martin Kendig, Stuart Lyon assisted David Scantlebury. Thirty six papers were delivered over four days and a range of younger and older researchers presented work covering a good variety of topics from highly practical talks (Googan, Colreavy, Schulz) to theoretical modelling (Alexander). There was also quite an emphasis on development and application of novel experimental techniques, e.g. an SKP talk by McMurray, an ENM talk by Woodcock, a stress test by Izlam, etc. The conference started with a welcome reception in Christ’s on the Monday evening. Papers were delivered from Tuesday morning through until Friday teatime, with the exception of Wednesday afternoon. Social activities included a buffet in Christ’s Hall on the Tuesday evening accompanied by wonderfully harmonious acapello music by the St Johns Singers and punting activities on the river Cam on Wednesday afternoon. About 20 people were involved in the latter. Luckily the weather, although a trifle windy and cloudy at times, remained dry and nobody fell in although the odd pole was lost. Also there was a nice banquet on the Thursday evening. There were,