IES - How paint works: the Forth Bridge and other stories

As a child I remember many Saturday mornings helping my dad wash his car. As he explained: “the dirt and salt needs to be washed off the paint because that’s what causes rusting”. Only later, after I had made my career in corrosion, did I understand what he meant.

Imagine living in a world without paint; what aspects of our civilisation would survive? Starting from the Forth Bridge (pictured), and with examples from the infrastructure, automotive and aerospace sectors, this talk provides an historical overview of protective coatings from antiquity to the present day. It explains how paints work, why they sometimes don’t work, and why modern corrosion protective organic coatings are smart, sustainable materials, critical in the protection of engineering and infrastructure assets and for extending their useful lifetimes.

Stuart Lyon is Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and Hon. Life Fellow and former President of the Institute of Corrosion. In 2020 he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering and received the European Corrosion Medal (a premier award of the European Federation of Corrosion) primarily for research on corrosion protection using organic coatings. He has worked with numerous companies and organisations during his career, publishing over 200 journal and conference papers and supervising over 60 PhD and around 100 MSc students.

Stuart was born in Paisley, raised in Renfrew, Newton Mearns and Cardross and educated at Glasgow Academy. Between 1976 and 1983 he attended Cambridge University (Trinity College) studying metallurgy and materials science as an undergraduate, subsequently remaining for his PhD. He then joined the Corrosion and Protection Centre at the former University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST, now The University of Manchester). After 41 years he retired back to Paisley thus completing a full circle.

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