A study of the corrosion of aluminum alloy 2024-T3 under thin electrolyte layers

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The corrosion of aluminum alloy 2024-T3 (AA2024-T3) under thin electrolyte layers was studied in 3.0 wt% sodium chloride solutions by cathodic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) method. The cathodic polarization measurements show that, when the electrolyte layer is thicker than 200 μm, the oxygen reduction current is close to that of the bulk solution. But in the range of 200–100 μm, the oxygen reduction current is inversely proportional to the layer thickness, which shows that the oxygen diffusion through the electrolyte layer is the rate-determining step for the oxygen reduction process. In the range of 100 μm to about 58 μm, the oxygen reduction current is slightly decreased probably due to the formation of aluminum hydroxide or the change of the diffusion pattern from 2-dimensional diffusion to one-dimensional diffusion. The further decrease in electrolyte layer thickness increase the oxygen reduction current to some extent again, because the diffusion of oxygen plays more important role in thin electrolyte layers. The EIS measurements show that the corrosion is controlled by the cathodic oxygen reduction at the initial stage, showing the largest corrosion rate at the electrolyte layer thickness of 105 μm. But at the later stage of corrosion, the anodic process begin to affect the corrosion rates and the corrosion rates show a maximum at 170 μm, which may be the thickness where the corrosion changes from cathodic control to anodic control. The corrosion rate under the very thin electrolyte layer (62 μm in this study) is even smaller than that in bulk solution, this is due to that the anodic process is strongly inhibited.