Surface Treatment of 304L Stainless Steel for Improving The Pitting Corrosion Resistance by Inhibitor

Electrochemical techniques were used to study the surface treatment for improving the pitting corrosion resistance of 304L stainless steel by inhibitors in chloride medium. Sodium molybdate (in concentration range : 0.005-80 g/l) , sodium nitrite (in concentration range : 0.001-50 g/l) and their mixture were used for this study. It was found that, molybdate and nitrite were good passivators for 304L stainless steel, but molybdate was not able to prohibit the pitting ; nitrite prevented pitting corrosion of 304L stainless steel only at the concentration more than 25 g/l. The relationship between pitting potentials and concentrations of inhibitors in the logarithm expression obeyed the linear function. It was found that the surface treatment by mixture of two inhibitors enables stainless steel to have increased the corrosion resistance , the pitting corrosion of 304L stainless steel was completely prohibited by the mixtures of molybdate and nitrite in ratio min, with $m\;\geq\;3\;and\;n\;\geq\;10$. The interesting cases on electrochemical measurement of threshold of inhibitors concentration combination for optimum surface treatment were described.