Researchers get a nanoscale glimpse of crevice and pitting corrosion as it happens
What affects almost everything made of metal, from cars to boats to underground pipes and even the fillings in your teeth? Corrosion—a slow process of decay. At a global cost of trillions of dollars annually, it carries a steep price tag, not to mention, the potential safety, environmental and health hazards it poses.
“Corrosion has been a major problem for a very long time,” said UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor Jacob Israelachvili. Particularly in confined spaces—thin gaps between machine parts, the contact area between hardware and metal plate, behind seals and under gaskets, seams where two surfaces meet—close observation of such electrochemical dissolution had been an enormous challenge, he added.
Not anymore.
Using a device called the Surface Forces Apparatus (SFA) developed by Israelachvili, he and his research team investigated the process of crevice and pitting corrosion and were able to get a real-time look at the process of corrosion on confined surfaces. Conducted with graduate student Howard Dobbs and project scientist Kai Kristiansen of UCSB, and colleagues at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung in Düsseldorf, the study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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