Correlating Experimental with Theoretical Studies for a New Ionic Liquid for Inhibiting Corrosion of Carbon Steel during Oil Well Acidification

Abstract

During the mandatory acidification process in the oil and gas industry, carbon steel unfortunately suffers significant corrosion damage. From this perspective, for the first time a new ionic liquid called 1-(2-(4-bromophenyl)-2-oxoethyl)-4-(tert-butyl)pyridin-1-ium bromide (ILB) has been used as an effective inhibitor for the carbon steel corrosion in aggressive HCl solution (15%) at 298 K. The experiments were managed with a number of different chemical and electrochemical techniques including weight loss, potentiodynamic polarization (PDP), and impedance spectroscopy (EIS). ILB has good inhibitory performance as an acidizing corrosion inhibitor for carbon steel even at low dosing levels of 1 × 10−3 M. The findings were promising as an inhibition efficiency of about 97% was achieved when ILB was added at low concentrations to the corrosive media. EIS results showed a significant rise in charge transfer resistance (Rct) values with increasing doses of ILB. PDP studies confirmed that ILB is a mixed type and obey Langmuir adsorption isotherm with chemical nature. The metal surface morphologies were inspected using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). Additionally, Density Functional Theory (DFT) and Molecular Dynamic Simulation (MDS) indicates that ILB molecules function as inhibitors more successfully. There is a high degree of concordance between practical and theoretical studies.