The effect of absorbed hydrogen on the dissolution of steel

Sebastian Thomas; Noemie Ott; Rebecca F Schaller; Jodie A Yuwono; Polina Volovitch; Guruprasad Sundararajan; Nikhil V Medhekar; Kevin Ogle; John R Scully; Nick Birbilis

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2016.e00209

The effect of absorbed hydrogen on the dissolution of steel

Heliyon. 2016 Dec 5;2(12):e00209. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2016.e00209. eCollection 2016 Dec.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia; Chimie ParisTech, Ecole Nationale Supurieure de Chimie de Paris, Paris 75005, France.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.
⁴ Chimie ParisTech, Ecole Nationale Supurieure de Chimie de Paris, Paris 75005, France.
⁵ GE Global Research, Bangalore 560066, India.
⁶ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.

Abstract

Atomic hydrogen (H) was introduced into steel (AISI 1018 mild steel) by controlled cathodic pre-charging. The resultant steel sample, comprising about 1 ppmw diffusible H, and a reference uncharged sample, were studied using atomic emission spectroelectrochemistry (AESEC). AESEC involved potentiodynamic polarisation in a flowing non-passivating electrolyte (0.6 M NaCl, pH 1.95) with real time reconciliation of metal dissolution using on-line inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The presence of absorbed H was shown to significantly increase anodic Fe dissolution, as evidenced by the enhanced detection of Fe²⁺ ions by ICP-OES. We discuss this important finding in the context of previously proposed mechanisms for H-effects on the corrosion of steels.

Keywords: Engineering; Materials Science.