Endurance and performance

The performance expectations for pre-finished steel for construction are extremely high, with demands for guaranteed long service lives, high flexibility and high aesthetic quality. The overall durability of the pre-finished steel product will depend on the metallic coating type used, pre-treatment chemistry, primer quality, topcoat paint quality and thickness, manufacturing process quality and consistency.

The main design factors considered when developing a pre-finished steel product are:

• The building location.
• The product’s performance in accelerated and natural exterior weathering.
• The type and quality of the elements making up the product.

Many years of experience at Corus of using duplex coated steels, metallic zinc coating plus organic paint coating, has shown that a synergistic performance is achievable resulting in an overall lifetime greater than the simple sum of the two elements.

The effective lifetime of a building envelope product and the maintenance regime required to meet this are essential components of the lifetime environmental impact of the building as a whole. For this reason, there are environmental as well as economic reasons why it is vital to ensure that the materials used have the optimum durable performance.