Corrosion

Wikipedia says that “Corrosion is a natural process that converts a refined metal into a more chemically stable form such as oxidehydroxidecarbonate or sulfide. It is the gradual destruction of materials (usually a metal) by chemical and/or electrochemical reaction with their environment. Corrosion engineering is the field dedicated to controlling and preventing corrosion.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosion, status 2021-05-18)

Many corrosion processes, especially metal corrosion, is caused by electrochemical reactions. The oxidizer is in many cases oxygen. Most metal objects are exposed to the air, which contains oxygen, and thus might corrode.

Corrosion researchers try to understand the reasons for corrosion down to the atomic scale with the goal to develop new methods of effective corrosion protection.

Electrochemical methods are perfect to studies the different properties of a system, which influence the corrosion processes. Electrochemistry provides within a short time period. Feel free to browse the knowledge base to learn about the possibilities.

Articles

Polarization Curves: setup, recording, processing and features

In this extensive section Polarization Curves are discussed. How to setup your equipment, the choice of parameters as well as the data processing is discussed. This will enable you to record a polarization curve and extract the corrosion rate from it by using PSTrace 5. Furthermore, the polarization curves and Evan’s diagrams for passivation films (thick and thin) are discussed. This section closes with a brief description of crevice and pitting corrosion.