featured project ARCHIVE

Reducing $20 Billion in Corrosion Costs

Corrosion costs DoD up to $20 billion annually and significantly hinders readiness by degrading weapon systems, equipment, and infrastructure. For example, corrosion-related faults degraded all of the Army’s force modernization helicopters, caused approximately half of all maintenance requirements on the Air Force’s KC-135 aircraft, and provided extensive topside damage to Navy ships returning from Middle East deployments.

We are a strategic partner with DoD in developing and implementing an aggressive, integrated program for evaluating, mitigating, and preventing corrosion. Our pioneering work on corrosion-related specifications and standards is accelerating the new product introduction process. In the training area, it resulted in the development of corrosion training packages for the DoD acquisition workforce, which will enhance corrosion mitigation design considerations of new weapon systems. We developed a framework for identifying all detailed corrosion-related costs to help pinpoint specific weapon systems and subsystems that are consuming resources and affecting equipment availability. With the precise information we provided on identifying the root causes of corrosion, DoD can now reduce costs and improve weapon system readiness and availability.