Study of copper corrosion by acetic acid vapours at 40 and 80% relative humidities

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the study of corrosion originated by pollutants in indoor environments, mainly organic acids. Amongst them, the most important is acetic acid. Copper corrosion originated by acetic acid vapours has been studied in this work, at three vapour concentrations (10, 100, and 300 ppm), at 40% and 80% relative humidity (RH) for a period of 21 days. Corrosion rate, obtained using gravimetric methods, was in the range from 0.08 to 0.17 mg/(dm 2 .day) (mdd) for 40% RH and from 0.11 to 6.53 mdd for 80% RH. Corrosion products have been studied using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and argon-ion sputtering techniques. The main compounds found were cuprite [Cu 2 O], copper hydroxide [Cu(OH) 2 ] and copper acetate [Cu(CH 3 COO) 2 ].