ELECTROCHEMICAL IMPEDANCE SPECTROSCOPY ON THERMAL AGEING EVALUATION OF EPOXY COATING CONTAINING ZINC RICH PRIMER

This research concentrates on the thermal ageing of a full 3-coat system with sacrificial pigment (zinc rich) primer on mild steel where the temperature dependence test is conducted to explore the correlation between the coating resistances with the corrosion rate underneath the coating. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is introduced over a range of temperature to extract activation energies for the rate of controlling processes in the corrosion reactions. It is expected that the zinc rich primer does not form a barrier coating for the metal substrate rather it will be the most active component of the substrate in the electrochemistry. Full 3-coat system with zinc rich primer show the extracted activation energy from coating resistance is significantly lower than the activation energy extracted from the charge transfer resistance. This suggested that the coating resistance from EIS cannot be controlling the corrosion reaction. The activation energies generated for the corrosion process here (78–97 kJmol-1) are very much higher than those of ion transport through the coating (19–37 kJmol-1) during early immersion. Further interesting findings come from the activation energy trends over time particularly for the corrosion process which shown that the value is decreasing where at the end of exposure, the activation energy values for coating and charge transfer resistance become quite similar. It is suggested that at this stage ion transport in the coating might be controlling the corrosion process unlike at the beginning; the activation energy is getting smaller due to coating degradation