Corrosion research at C.E.R.L.: British Corrosion Laboratories (6) Available to Purchase

The Central Electricity Research Laboratories (CERL) at Leatherhead is the largest and longest established of the research centres of the Central Electricity Generating Board. Its staff numbers about seven hundred, three hundred of whom are professional scientists, and their programmes cover research into generation of electricity by coal‐ and oil‐fired power stations, and into transmission and distribution. CERL's activities include those as diverse as magneto‐hydrodynamics and the microbiology of soils; the dispersion of plumes from high chimneys and the basic physics of brittle fracture in metals. Three quarters of its work and almost all the corrosion research relates to generating electricity, although it has some of the best facilities in the world for studying the transmission of electricity at very high voltages, and the first corrosion problem it tackled was on steel cored aluminium conductors.