Overview
Projects
Electrochemical measurements
nCATS has a wide range of electrochemical equipment from electrochemical workstations to Faraday cages to specialised specimen holders. The workstations can perform a variety of electrochemical experiments including polarisation, impedance, noise and zero resistance ammetry. The various techniques allow the exploration of corrosion and tribocorrosion behaviour, including the measurement of corrosion current and potential of single and multiple-coupled metals in various corrosive environments.
The measurements can also explore polymer/paint coating protection, or even any non-metallic/conductive coating; measurements over periods of immersion allows the assessment of coating integrity.
Numerous project employ electrochemical equipment, from a student and research projects, to commercial work on consultancy jobs.
Projects include:
- Designing sensors to detect corrosion in hidden places - developing a suite of electrochemical sensors to monitor structural health of maritime platforms. In particular they have utilised and developed robust boron-doped diamond (BDD) electrode arrays and a contactless capillary electrophoresis detector
- Tribocorrosion of cemented tungsten carbide in oil and gas drilling environments - The objective of this study is to improve understanding of tribocorrosion systems using controlled laboratory conditions on cemented tungsten carbide cobalt (WC-Co)
Papers that have utilised electrochemical equipment:
- Electrochemical detection of cupric ions with boron-doped diamond electrode for marine corrosion monitoring
- Electrochemical behaviour of nickel–aluminium bronze in chloride media: Influence of pH and benzotriazole
- Galvanic Corrosion Performance of High-Strength Copper-Nickel Alloys in Seawater
- The corrosion of nickel–aluminium bronze in seawater
- Erosion and erosion–corrosion performance of cast and thermally sprayed nickel–aluminium bronze
- Corrosion, erosion and erosion–corrosion performance of plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) deposited Al2O3 coatings
- Flow Corrosion Behavior of Austenitic Stainless Steels UNS S30403 and UNS S31603
- Interpretation of electrochemical measurements made during micro-scale abrasion-corrosion
- Micro-abrasion mechanisms of cast CoCrMo in simulated body fluids
- Micro-abrasion–corrosion of cast CoCrMo—Effects of micron and sub-micron sized abrasives
- Exposure effects of strong alkaline conditions on the microscale abrasion–corrosion of D-gun sprayed WC–10Co–4Cr coating
- Investigation of micro-scale abrasion–corrosion of WC-based sintered hardmetal and sprayed coating using in situ electrochemical current-noise measurements
- Exposure effects of alkaline drilling fluid on the microscale abrasion–corrosion of WC-based hardmetals
- Micro-abrasion–corrosion of a CoCrMo alloy in simulated artificial hip joint environments
- A ‘3-body’ abrasion wear study of bioceramics for total hip joint replacements
- Electrochemical sensing and characterization of aerobic marine bacterial biofilms on gold electrode surfaces
The electrochemical equipment can perform a number of standard measurements including:
- Physical Electrochemistry - Techniques such as cyclic voltammetry, chronoamperometry, and chronopotentiometry and derivatives of these techniques.
- Pulse Voltammetry - Techniques such as pulse voltammetry, square wave voltammetry, and associated stripping techniques such as anodic stripping voltammetry.
- DC Corrosion - Run standard DC corrosion tests such as polarization resistance, potentiodynamic, cyclic polarization, and galvanic corrosion in addition to a number of others.
- Electrochemical Signal Analyzer - Designed specifically for the acquisition and analysis of time-dependent electrochemical noise signals. Cell voltage and current are continuously monitored at rates from 0.1 Hz to 1 kHz. A full featured set of analysis tools provides powerful analysis features such as statistical analysis, detrending, impedance spectra, and histogram analysis.
- Electrochemical Frequency Modulation - A non-destructive corrosion rate measurement technique. It allows for measurement of the corrosion rate without prior knowledge of the Tafel constants. In addition, the technique determines the Tafel constants and provides 2 internal validity checks.
- Electrochemical Noise - A more general form of electrochemical noise testing
- Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy - includes experimental scripts for potentiostatic, galvanostatic and hybrid impedance spectroscopy experiments in addition to single frequency techniques like Mott-Schottky. We also have our unique power-leveling multisine technique that improves signal-to-noise across the spectrum. On the analysis side, it provides tools for fitting spectra to equivalent circuit models, Kramers-Kronig transform for data validation and a graphical model editor. Our software even includes a script for EIS simulation.