October 1992
UK Corrosion Conference
Manchester, UK
Conference Paper
Rapid Methods for Assessing Microbes Relevant to Corrosion
This paper reviews existing and developing methods which give the promise of obtaining a rapid estimation of the numbers and/or the activity of problem-causing microbes in industrial systems. Whilst many of these methods need to be carried out by trained microbiological technicians and others are only used in research laboratories, some have been developed into commercially available test kits, primarily for sulphate-reducing bacteria. Such kits will undoubtedly be more widely used in the future in applications where speed of result rather than precision is required. There is currently no well defined set of standard practices covering the use of such novel techniques. At the present time, therefore, their use should be backed up by conventional test methods to obtain a correlation between existing and novel methods. In this review, a number of commercial test kits are discussed or described: the mention of any particular test kit does not imply the endorsement of the product by the author. Any new method must be fully assessed prior to its use as a monitoring tool.
This paper describes techniques which are used, or could be developed, to give rapid assessment of:
