The failure of metallic materials caused by corrosion strongly impacts our society with cost, safety, health, and performance issues. The mechanisms of corrosion propagation are fairly well understood, and various means of mitigation are known even if research is still necessary to improve this knowledge or to develop corrosion protection for the application of new materials. The vision of CIMNAS is that a major breakthrough for corrosion protection lies in a deep understanding and control of the initiation stage triggering corrosion. Corrosion initiation takes place at the atomic/molecular scale or at a scale of a few nanometres (the nanoscale) on metal and alloy surfaces, metallic, oxidised or coated, and interacting with the corroding environment.
The mission of CIMNAS was to challenge the difficulty of understanding corrosion initiation at the nanometric/atomic scale on such complex interfaces, ultimately aiming at designing more robust metallic surfaces via the understanding of corrosion initiation mechanisms.
The project was structured in three tasks to achieve three knowledge breakthroughs, each implementing a new vision of corrosion science and addressing a key issue for the understanding of corrosion initiation on metal and alloy surfaces: (i) Understanding the stability of surface oxide films, (ii) Understanding corrosion initiation versus passivation at the surface terminations of grain boundaries, (iii) Understanding the corrosion inhibition mechanisms of surfaces not uniformly passivated.
Resources included a team of highly experienced and recognised researchers headed by the PI, a unique apparatus recently installed at the PI’s lab, integrating surface spectroscopy, microscopy, and electrochemistry for in situ measurements in a closed system, novel experimental approaches, and a strong complementarity of experiments and modelling.
The ambition of the project was high. The scientific expertise of the PI and his team, the equipment available at the PI’s lab, the resources provided by the ERC were perfectly aligned with this ambition, so the action was fully implemented, and the objectives of the research program have been reached.
