Stainless steel (SS) is one of the most commonly used metallic food contact materials. It may be classified based on its microstructure whether ferritic, austenitic, martensitic, duplex or precipitation hardened. Austenitic SS, among mentioned grades, has the largest contribution to market due to its numerous industrial and domestic applications. In this study, the corrosion behavior of AISI 202 SS – a cheaper grade of stainless steel, in three different solution temperatures of citric acid was investigated using different electrochemical techniques such as open-circuit potential (OCP) measurements, potentiodynamic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The results were compared to that obtained from conventional AISI 304 SS. OCP, polarization and impedance measurements agreed that AISI 202 SS has comparable resistance to that of AISI 304 SS in citric acid at ambient temperature and at 50 °C. At 70 °C, results of OCP measurements suggest that AISI 304 SS exhibited greater performance as indicated by more positive OCP values in the designated solution. EIS results indicate that the two alloys have identical corrosion resistance even at 70 °C as indicated by their comparable polarization resistance (Rp). The corrosion mechanism in both alloys is charge-transfer controlled as indicated by depressed semi-circular appearance of the generated Nyquist plots. The values of corrosion current densities (icorr) extracted from polarization curves indicate that the initial corrosion rates were higher in AISI 304 than AISI 202 SS suggesting that formation of more protective film may have occurred on the former alloy.
Comparative study between the electrochemical behavior of TiN, TiCxNy and CrN hard coatings by using microscopy and electrochemical techniques
