CORROSION RESISTANCE OF STRUCTURAL AMORPHOUS METAL

Corrosion costs the Department of Defense billions of dollars every year, with an immense quantity of material in various structures undergoing corrosion. For example, in addition to fluid and seawater piping, ballast tanks, and propulsions systems, approximately 345 million square feet of structure aboard naval ships and crafts require costly corrosion control measures. The use of advanced corrosion-resistant materials to prevent the continuous degradation of this massive surface area would be extremely beneficial. The potential advantages of amorphous metals have been recognized for some time [Latanison 1985]. Iron-based corrosion-resistant, amorphous-metal coatings under development may prove important for maritime applications [Farmer et al. 2005]. Such materials could also be used to coat the entire outer surface of containers for the transportation and long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel, or to protect welds and heat affected zones, thereby preventing exposure to environments that might cause stress corrosion cracking [Farmer et al. 1991, 2000a, 2000b]. In the future, it may be possible to substitute such high-performance iron-based materials for more-expensive nickel-based alloys, thereby enabling cost savings in a wide variety of industrial applications. It should be noted that thermal-spray ceramic coatings have also been investigated for such applications [Haslam et al. 2005]. This report focuses on the corrosion resistance of a yttrium-containing amorphous metal, SAM1651. SAM1651 has a glass transition temperature of {approx}584 C, a recrystallization temperature of {approx}653 C, and a melting point of {approx}1121 C. The measured critical cooling rate for SAM1651 is {le} 80 K per second, respectively. The yttrium addition to SAM1651 enhances glass formation, as reported by Guo and Poon [2003]. The corrosion behavior of SAM1651 was compared with nickel-based Alloy 22 in electrochemical polarization measurements performed in several highly concentrated chloride solutions