SOCORRO – Seeking Out Corrosion, Before It Is Too Late

Overview / Context

Corrosion is a silent yet pervasive threat wherever steel meets water—from maritime structures and port systems to water treatment plants, desalination units, and offshore renewable installations.
In Europe alone, corrosion-related costs exceed €500 billion annually—about 3.8 % of EU GDP.

Despite this enormous burden, industry lacks a unified, real-time, and predictive approach to assess where, when, and how corrosion occurs. Many existing solutions remain reactive, leading to overmaintenance, unexpected failures, and wasted resources.

SOCORRO was conceived to respond to this challenge: a multidisciplinary initiative combining sensing, data analytics, AI, and decision support to transform corrosion management from reactive to proactive.

Objectives

SOCORRO aims to:

  • Provide companies with independent, objective means to assess corrosion risks in their installations, increasing awareness and enabling timely preventive action.
  • Develop a fast, in situ sensor system that continuously monitors relevant environmental markers in submerged steel environments.
  • Create statistical and AI models to interpret collected data and estimate cumulative corrosion risk over asset lifetimes.
  • Demonstrate and validate the system in industrial case studies across multiple sectors (wind turbines, ship hulls, ballast tanks, harbour sheets, desalination, process water).
  • Deliver an intuitive dashboard / decision-support interface to present risk metrics, alerts, and actionable insights to end users.

Through these objectives, SOCORRO aims to move its technology readiness from TRL 4 toward TRL 6–7.

Technical Approach

SOCORRO employs a hybrid methodology that spans sensing, data analytics, and user interface design:

  1. Environmental Sensing & Monitoring
    • Deploy sensors that record multiple parameters (temperature, salinity, pH, oxygen content, biological variables) in real operating environments.
    • Use “living lab” structures (mobile and static pontoons, lab-augmented systems) to expose steel coupons in real marine, port, and controlled environments.
  2. Data Aggregation & Modeling
    • Collect and preprocess time-series environmental data.
    • Develop machine learning and statistical models to correlate environmental markers to corrosion rates, quantify uncertainties, and produce risk scores.
  3. Decision Support & Visualization
    • Build a user-friendly dashboard to relay risk values, trends, and alerts.
    • Provide recommendations on inspection timings, material choice or mitigation strategies.
  4. Industrial Demonstration & Validation
    • Implement the full stack in 11 industrial sites across different sectors (maritime, water, energy).
    • Evaluate economic impacts, maintenance cost reduction, safety gains, and system robustness.

Demonstration Sites & Living Labs

SOCORRO is grounded in real-world validation through its living labs and pilot installations:

  • Port of Ostend & Vlissingen: Pontoons instrumented with sensors to assess corrosion at varying depths and conditions.
  • Corrosion Lab at Antwerp Maritime Academy (AMA): Controlled lab-environment experiments to complement field data, investigating fouling, bacterial influence, and coating performance.
  • Ship hulls, harbour structures, wastewater environments: Exposed to real conditions, these serve as testbeds for the SOCORRO approach.
  • Coating and microbial studies: Studying iron-eating bacteria and how environmental variability influences degradation.

These demonstration efforts aim to ground modeling in reality, test the technology across contexts, and refine algorithms continuously.

Expected Outcomes & Impact

SOCORRO is poised to deliver multiple benefits:

  • Reduced corrosion rates, extending the life span of metal infrastructure and reducing repair frequency.
  • Cost control and operational safety for maritime and industrial installations.
  • Increased infrastructure reliability, higher economic return on capital, especially in renewable energy and port systems.
  • Better water and resource management by integrating corrosion risk insights in broader industrial and environmental systems.
  • Enhanced industry awareness and knowledge transfer — making corrosion management more data-driven and proactive.

Partners & Funding

SOCORRO is a collaboration of 15 core partners and over 32 observing partners, spanning academia, industry, and public institutions across Europe.
Key participants include Antwerp Maritime Academy (lead), KU Leuven, Ghent University, Sirris, Université de Lille, and others.
Funding is provided under the Interreg 2 Seas program (project code 2S07-031).

Timeline & Milestones

  • Start: March 2020
  • End / Closure: September 2022 (with follow-on support and maintenance)
  • Key milestones included sensor development, pilot deployment, modeling phases, dashboard rollout, and industrial validation cycles.