Despite decades of research, metallic corrosion remains a long-standing challenge in many engineering applications. Specifically, designing a material that can resist corrosion both in abiotic as well as biotic environments remains elusive. Here we design a lightweight sulfur-selenium (S-Se) alloy with high stiffness and ductility that can serve as a universal corrosion-resistant coating with protection efficiency of ~99.9% for steel in a wide range of diverse environments. S-Se coated mild steel shows a corrosion rate that is 6-7 orders of magnitude lower than bare metal in abiotic (simulated seawater and sodium sulfate solution) and biotic (sulfate-reducing bacterial medium) environments. The coating is strongly adhesive and mechanically robust. We attribute the high corrosion resistance of the alloy in diverse environments to its semi-crystalline, non-porous, anti-microbial, and viscoelastic nature with superior mechanical performance, enabling it to successfully block a variety of diffusing species.
@article{arxiv.2009.02451,
title = {Corrosion Resistance of Sulfur-Selenium Alloy Coatings},
author = {Sandhya Susarla and Govind Chilkoor and Yufei Cui and Taib Arif and Thierry Tsafack and Anand Puthirath and Parambath M. Sudeep and Jawahar R. Kalimuthu and Aly Hassan and Samuel Castro-Pardo and Morgan Barnes and Rafael Verduzco and Tobin Filleter and Nikhil Koratkar and Venkataramana Gadhamshetty and Muhammad M Rahman and Pulickel M. Ajayan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.02451},
year = {2020}
}