Substrate Protection with Corrosion Scales: Can We Depend on Iron Carbonate?

Controlling corrosion with naturally occurring corrosion scales is potentially a more environmentally sustainable alternative to current approaches, including dosing of organic corrosion inhibitors. We report grazing incidence X-ray diffractograms correlated with electrochemical measurements to elucidate the growth and corrosion protection properties of a corrosion scale composed of FeCO crystallites, which is encountered in various key energy industry applications. Data, acquired as a function of time from high-purity iron immersed in CO-saturated deionized HO at pH 6.