Dr Bob Cottis

Professional biography

Bob Cottis studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1967, specializing in Metallurgy. He was awarded a PhD in 1973 for work on electrodeposition in the fluidized electrode at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science at Cambridge.

He was appointed as a Project Manager, then Research Manager at the Fulmer Research Institute, a contract research organization that was wholly-owned by the Institute of Physics. There he worked on long-term research in the general area of corrosion, with much of the work being on corrosion fatigue. In addition he undertook many short-term failure investigations and other consultancy work.

He joined the Corrosion and Protection Centre, UMIST in 1979, initially as a lecturer, then senior lecturer (1992) and reader (2000).

He is active in the development of teaching in the field of Corrosion, being responsible for the development of a distance learning approach to the MSc in Corrosion Control Engineering, and Director of the TLTP Consortium that developed the Ecorr courseware to support corrosion teaching.

He is founding editor of the open access online Journal of Corrosion Science and Engineering and founder of the CORROS-L Mailing List for corrosion questions. In 2005 he was awarded the T.J. Hull Award of NACE International for services to NACE in the field of publications.

Current research projects

• Hydrogen embrittlement, especially the effects of local chemistry on hydrogen uptake.
• Stress corrosion cracking in high temperature water environments.
• Theoretical aspects of the use of electrochemical noise measurements for the study of corrosion processes. Two programs that may be useful for the analysis of electrochemical noise are availalbe here
• Modelling of corrosion processes using finite element, neural network and similar methods.
• The application of computing methods to corrosion control.

Some Recent Publications

• R.A. Cottis, Li Qing, G. Owen, S.J. Gartland, I.A. Helliwell and M. Turega, "Neural Networks for Corrosion Data Reduction", Materials and Design, 20, 4, pp169-178 (1999).
• S.B. Lyon, J. Cai and R.A. Cottis, "Phenomenological Modelling of Atmospheric Corrosion Using an Artificial Neural Network", Corrosion Science, 41, 10, pp2001-2030 (1999). [The data for this paper are available as a Word document]
• R.A. Cottis, "The Interpretation of Electrochemical Noise Data", Corrosion, 27, 3, 265-285 (2001)
• R.A. Cottis, M.A.A. Al-Awadhi, H. Al-Mazeedi and S. Turgoose, "Measures for the Detection of Localized Corrosion with Electrochemical Noise", Electrochimica Acta, 46, 24-25, 3665-3674 (2001).
• M.A.A. Al-Mazeedi and R.A. Cottis, "A Practical Evaluation of Electrochemical Noise Parameters as Indicators of Corrosion Type", Electrochimica Acta, 49, 2787-2793 (2004).

Full list of publications