Influence of Thermomechanical Treatments on Corrosion of Carbon Steel in Synthetic Geopolymer Fly Ash Pore Solution

Abstract

In this study the effect of thermomechanical treatments in chloride induced pitting corrosion is presented for carbon steel rebars exposed to synthetic fly ash (FA) pore solution. Due to the likely phase transformations that steel reinforcements in concrete experience during the event of a fire, the understanding of the corrosion behavior of such phases is key in predicting the stability of the structure. The motivation for this study arrives from the scarce literature regarding the corrosion behavior of thermomechanically treated steel reinforcements in FA environments and the need for further investigation to understand its mechanism. In order to better understand the effects on the corrosion behavior electrochemical measurements including cyclic potentiodynamic polarization curves (CPP) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) were used. It was found that quenched specimens showed enhanced corrosion kinetics as their icorr values were higher, being of 3.18 × 10−5 and 2.20 × 10−5 A/cm2 for water and oil quenched compared to 2.13 × 10−6 A/cm2 for the as-received. Furthermore, the effective capacitance of the double layer (Ceff,dl) showed the lower stability of the passive film for the quenched specimens, with values of 1.11 × 10−3 µF/cm2 for the as-receive sample that decreased to 8.12 × 10−4 µF/cm2 for the water quenched sample. The anodic charge transfer coefficient in the synthetic FA alkaline pore solution changes from 0.282 to 0.088, for the as-received and water quenched rebars specimens, respectively. These results indicate a lower energy barrier for the anodic dissolution reaction of quenched specimens, indicating that martensite and bainite microstructures promote corrosion process. Enhanced corrosion was found on quenched samples presenting martensite and bainite microstructure as showed by the increased pith depth, with values of 5 μm compared to 1 μm observed in the as-received samples.