A Study on the Corrosion Inhibition Effects of Sodium Heptanoate for Carbon Steel in Aqueous Solution

The carboxylates as a corrosion inhibitor has been studied by many researchers because of its environmental safety and low depletion rate. However, conventional test methods of inhibitor such as weight loss measurements, linear polarization resistance and corrosion potential monitoring etc., evaluate uniform corrosion of metals. These methods are unable to evaluate crevice-related corrosions, which are encountered in most of heat exchanging facilities. In order to choose the optimum corrosion inhibitor, the appropriate test methods are required to evaluate their performances in service environment. From this point of view, polarization technique was used to evaluate the characteristics of sodium heptanoate on corrosion behavior for carbon steel. Especially a thin film crevice sensor technique were applied to simulate the crevice corrosion in this study. From these experiments, we found that oxygen as an oxidizing agent was required to obtain stable passive film on the metal. Presence of oxygen, however, accelerated crevice corrosion. Potential shift by oxygen depletion and weakened inhibitive film inside the crevice were responsible for such accelerated feature. It is shown that film for corrosion inhibition is a mixture of sodium heptanoate and iron (II) heptanoate as reaction product of iron surface and sodium heptanoate. The iron (II) heptanoate which has been synthesized by reaction of heptanoic acid and ferrous chloride in methanol solution forms bidentate complex.