• Ostraat, Michele L.
• Kotula, Paul G.
• Pilyugina, Tatiana S.
• Aguiar, Jeffery
• Taie, Ihsan M.
• Bufford, Daniel C.
• Mook, William M.
• Kucharski, Timothy
• Hayden, Steven C.
• Chisholm, Claire
• Hattar, Khalid
• Grudt, Rachael

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Mitigating corrosion remains a daunting challenge due to localized, nanoscale corrosion events that are poorly understood but are known to cause unpredictable variations in material longevity. Here, the most recent advances in liquid-cell transmission electron microscopy were employed to capture the advent of localized aqueous corrosion in carbon steel at the nanoscale and in real time. Localized corrosion initiated at a triple junction formed by a solitary cementite grain and two ferrite grains and then continued at the electrochemically-active boundary between these two phases. With this analysis, we identified facetted pitting at the phase boundary, uniform corrosion rates from the steel surface, and data that suggest that a re-initiating galvanic corrosion mechanism is possible in this environment. These observations represent an important step toward atomically defining nanoscale corrosion mechanisms, enabling the informed development of next-generation inhibition technologies and the improvement of corrosion predictive models.</jats:p>

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• surface
• Carbon
• grain
• phase
• steel
• transmission electron microscopy
• uniform corrosion
• phase boundary
• galvanic corrosion