Effect of Nano-Grained Structure on the Electrochemical Behavior of Pure Copper in an alkaline solution

Effect of nano-grained structure on the electrochemical behavior of pure copper has been studied in this work. For this purpose, nano-grained structure was produced by accumulative roll bonding (ARB)process. To evaluate the microstructure and grain size refining after 8 cycles of ARB process, atomic forcemicroscopy (AFM) was used. AFM image showed that nano-grained structure with average size of below 100 nm appeared after 8 cycles of ARB. Electrochemical behavior of annealed and 8 cycles number of ARB process has been studied by potentiodynamic polarization, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy(EIS) and Mott-Schottky analysis in an alkaline solution. All electrochemical tests revealed that as a result of grain refinement, the electrochemical behavior of the nano-grained structure significantly improves compared to the annealed pure copper.

Keywords:

Pure copper , AFM , Polarization , EIS , Passive film