Abstract
High-quality graphene zinc-containing anticorrosive coatings are highly and urgently desirable for effective, economical anticorrosion of metals and alloys in industrial products. The realization of such coatings is, however, hindered by the dispersibility and compatibility of the graphene in them. This work reports a novel direct modification of graphene using sodium polystyrene sulfonate (PSS) without reduction of graphene oxide, leading to homogeneous dispersion of graphene in water. The agglomeration of graphene is prevented thanks to the formation of π−π interaction between PSS and graphene sheets. Such graphene dispersion can effectively improve the anticorrosion performance of the zinc-containing epoxy coatings. With the addition of graphene modified by PSS into the 20% zinc-containing epoxy coating (graphene is 0.05% by weight of the coating), its anticorrosion properties revealed by both electrochemical characterization and the neutral salt spray tolerance analysis are rather close to those of 60% zinc-containing epoxy coating. These results demonstrate that direct PSS modification is an effective method for graphene dispersion and thus open a pathway to achieve graphene zinc-containing anticorrosive coatings with high performance.
Highlights
Nowadays anticorrosion of metals (Fe, Cu, Ni and carbon steel, etc.) and their alloys are of great significance because metal corrosion has caused tremendous economic losses and hazards to industry and society
A 20 mg portion of graphene was dispersed in 20 mL of deionized water by cell grinder, and the mixture was ultrasonicated for 1 h to obtain graphene dispersion solution (1 mg/mL)
The polystyrene sulfonate (PSS)-G and graphene (G) were both examined by Raman spectroscopy and the results were shown in Figure 2a, where black and red spectra show the Raman spectra of G and PSS-G, respectively
Summary
Nowadays anticorrosion of metals (Fe, Cu, Ni and carbon steel, etc.) and their alloys are of great significance because metal corrosion has caused tremendous economic losses and hazards to industry and society. In addition to the use of modified graphene in anticorrosion coatings, Kratochvílová et al [17] reported that carbon coating, i.e., polycrystalline diamond can be used as a protective material against high temperature corrosion. They obtained a double layer consisting of 500 nm nanocrystalline diamond as the bottom layer and 2 μm chromium-aluminum-silicon nitride as the upper layer. Graphene was directly modified by PSS and good aqueous graphene dispersion was obtained This method is facile and leads to high quality graphene layers. The results are of great interest for both aqueous graphene dispersions and graphene composite coatings
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