Databases and expert systems for high temperature corrosion and coatings

The huge, and rapidly increasing, amount of data existing in the field of high temperature corrosion and high temperature protective coatings stress the need for information systems capable of collecting, evaluating and retrieving this wealth of information. This paper is a review on the currently available data banks and expert systems in the domain of high temperature corrosion. It first briefly presents the state of knowledge on coatings for hot components of gas turbines and energy systems operating in aggressive environments to show the need for easily available and reliable information to select the appropriate coating for a specific application. The structures and main characteristics of the different types of computerized information systems, e.g. databases and data banks, knowledge bases, intelligent data banks and expert systems are then described. Finally, the currently available data bases and expert systems on high temperature corrosion and high temperature coatings are reviewed and described, when information is available. Special attention is brought to the problems arising for data base management, e.g. data collection, data updating, data validation and data evaluation.