Why the Concern?
The huge economic impact of environment aggressiveness and corrosion of metallic structures is a very important issue for Europe, which has lost more than €200 billion every year due to corrosion degradation of investments. Transportation is one of the most important industries for corrosion resistance. To meet this demand, application of organic coatings is a cost effective method of improving the corrosion protection and, therefore, the durability of metallic structures.Since 2008, the EU project ”MUST,” established with high European concerns to advance the protection against corrosion and similar defects, has been involved in the design, development, upscaling and application of novel multi-level protection systems like coatings and adhesives. The strategy is to respond to destructive conditions with self-healing reactions. This ability is expected to be most effective if it is reacting at certain stages of degradation with different healing processes. A significant improvement of the durability of protective coatings is evident if early stage degradation phenomena are recovered and, for example, decrease of the barrier properties of the coating is postponed to longer exposure times.