Galvanic Corrosion Behavior of Zn and Al Couples in NaCl Solution

Abstract

Multi-materialization is being promoted in automotive structural materials, and fuel economy is being improved by replacing steel with aluminum and other lightweight metallic materials. Automotive steel is often galvanized for corrosion protection, and galvanic corrosion of aluminum and zinc in an atmospheric environment is a very important issue in evaluating automotive durability. Zinc is usually considered to be an anode when combined with aluminum, but its galvanic corrosion behavior can be complicated by environmental conditions because the corrosion potentials of the two are relatively close. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the galvanic corrosion behavior of the couples consisting of zinc and aluminum under corrosive environmental conditions.The galvanic couple used in this study was fabricated from AA1050 Al and zinc plates. The width and length of both plates are 10 mm and 15 mm, respectively. After connecting lead wires to each plate, both plates were embedded in epoxy resin. To fabricate coplanar galvanic couples in this study, both plates were placed separately along the surface from a gap size of 500 um. The surfaces of the galvanic pairs were polished with SiC paper to JIS 2000 grit and cleaned with EtOH. The test solutions used in this study were aqueous NaCl solutions of various concentrations from 0.01 to 2 M, prepared with Milli-Q water and reagent grade chemicals. Galvanic currents and corrosion potentials were measured to investigate the galvanic corrosion behavior of the couples after 72 hours of galvanic corrosion experiments in the test solutions.The results of the galvanic corrosion test showed that the immersion potentials of the galvanic couples were lower at higher NaCl concentrations. The galvanic current decreased with immersion time, finally reaching about 1 uA in all NaCl solutions. The results of the electrochemical impedance measurements for galvanic couples in various NaCl concentrations showed that the impedance gradually increased with immersion time. It was also found that the impedance can be expressed as an electrical equivalent circuit consisting of two time constants, and that the impedance increases at intermediate frequencies between 0.1 and 1 Hz, which is thought to correspond to the dissolution reaction of Zn. This was the same trend as the behavior of the galvanic current. These results suggest that prolonged immersion reduces the galvanic current and the dissolution rate of zinc due to the passivation of the A1050 surface and the suppression of cathodic reactions.