Development and Evaluation of a Thin Cerium Oxide-Gelatin Nanolaminate Coating for Corrosion Protection of AISI 316L Stainless Steel

Abstract

AISI 316L stainless steel is widely used for multiple applications because of its good mechanical properties and corrosion resistance in multiple environments. However, the long exposure of AISI 316L steel to aggressive environments containing chloride ions limits its electrochemical performance significantly. The objective of this research is to develop and evaluate a thin cerium oxide-gelatin nanolaminate coatings for corrosion protection of the spin-coated AISI 316L stainless steel in 3.5% NaCl solution as the corrosion medium. The nanolaminate coat-ings were evaluated by the potentiodynamic polarization technique and the characterization of the coatings was performed by using XRD, SEM, and EDX. The results show that the corrosion behaviour of CeO2-gelatin nano-laminate coatings significantly improves the corrosion behaviour of the coated AISI 316L steel. The results also confirm the formation of homogeneous and crack-free coatings without any noticeable defect. One-way ANOVA analysis was used to examine the statistical significance of coating types. The novelty of this research is the development and preparing nanocomposites coatings by using gelatin as a gel matrix for nanocomposites powder dis-persion instead of the traditional methods to improves the uniform and localized corrosion of the AISI 316L steel. The results showed that the prepared coatings significantly improved the uniform and localized corrosion resistance of the AISI 316L steel.