Fabrication and characterization of graphene oxide-chitosan-zinc oxide ternary nano-hybrids for the corrosion inhibition of mild steel

Abstract

In this study, graphene oxide-chitosan (GO-CS) and graphene oxide-chitosan-ZnO (GO-CS-ZnO) hybrids were synthesized in order to examine the effectiveness of hybridization in enhancing the corrosion inhibition activity of graphene oxide (GO). In this way, the synthesized GO and nano-hybrids were firstly characterized by using FTIR, UV–Vis, FE-SEM, AFM, TEM and subsequently were studied in term of corrosion inhibition. Our primary results indicated that, single-layer GO, GO-CS hybrids and also GO-CS-ZnO ternary nano-hybrids were appropriately synthesized. The corrosion inhibition results demonstrated superior performance of GO-CS hybrids than pure GO. In addition, GO-CS-ZnO ternary nano-hybrids revealed the highest corrosion inhibition activity compared with all nano-materials studied here. The corrosion inhibition efficiency of GO (η = 42.35%) was enhanced to 83.81% and 85.61% for GO-CS and GO-CS-ZnO nanocomposites in 500 ppm conc., respectively. Generally, our results demonstrated that hybridization strategy successfully promoted the corrosion inhibition efficiency of GO. Furthermore, Langmuir isotherm was used in three methods (PDP, EIS and LPR) to study the adsorption of synthesized nano-materials on mild steel.