Correlations between standard accelerated tests for protective organic coatings and field performance

Accelerated testing is widely used in development and pre-qualification of protective organic coatings. In this work 26 coating systems have been investigated in a 2-year C5 atmospheric exposure field test, ISO 9227 salt spray test, ISO 12944-9 cyclic ageing and ISO 16773 electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurement of coating resistance. Of the 26 coating systems, 16 have epoxy mastic primers and 10 have zinc rich epoxy primers. In the field test, the zinc rich primer improved corrosion creep resistance from scribe by a factor of about 10. However, this is not reflected in any of the accelerated lab tests. The lab tests all show rather poor correlation to the field test with respect to corrosion creep. All the coatings had little corrosion creep from scribe in the field test, even the coating systems with epoxy mastic primers. The large focus on this parameter in coating pre qualification testing, e.g. in ISO 12944-6 and 12944-9, may therefore not be justified.