Wagner-Traud concept

Landolt gave a more detailed description of the Wagner-Traud concept of partial deposition currents. In Figure 8.3 different situations of combinations of partial current densities are described in Evans diagrams. In the gray areas the less noble component is preferentially deposited. 

Further, these anodic and cathodic reactions can occur spatially at adjacent locations on the stuface of a metal electrode rather than on two separated metal electrodes as shown in Fig. 11-1, where the anodic dissolution of iron and the cathodic reduction of hydrogen ions proceed simultaneously on an iron electrode in aqueous solution. The electrons produced in the anodic dissolution of iron are the same electrons involved in the cathodic reduction of hydrogen ions hence, the anodic reaction cannot proceed more rapidly than that the electrons can be accepted by the cathodic reaction and vice versa. Such an electrode at which a pair of anodic and cathodic reactions proceeds is called the mixed electrode . For the mixed electrodes, the anode (current entrance) and the cathode (current exit) coexist on the same electrode interface. The concept of the mixed electrode was first introduced in the field of corrosion science of metals [Evans, 1946 Wagner-Traud, 1938]. 

It follows that the corrosion potential on a heterogeneous metal corroding by local-cell action is virtually equal to the mixed potential at an electrode on which electronation and deelectronation reactions are occurring on spatially separated sinks and sources and is identical to a mixed potential when the metal is corroding homogeneously by a Wagner-Traud mechanism. The concept of the corrosion current /corr and the corrosion potential 40corr will now be treated quantitatively. 

Although the original additivity principle of Wagner and Traud has been an immensely useful concept with applications in numerous fields, carefully designed studies in receiit years have revealed a number of exceptions. These have been described above and are summarized in... 

The corrosion behavior of semiconductors can, in principle, be described within the framework of the same concepts as for metals (see, for example, Wagner and Traud, 1938), but with due account for specific features in the electrochemical behavior of a solid caused by its semiconducting nature (Gerischer, 1970). One of the main features is photosensitivity related to a change in the free-carrier concentration under illumination. Photosensitivity underlies the phenomenon of photocorrosion. 

C. Wagner and W. Traud, Z. Elektrochem. 44 391 (1938). The original formulation of the mixed potential concept and the basic theory of corrosion of a pure metal. 

Metals are obtained by the treatment of oxides and sulfide ores found in the earth. However, there is an initial difficulty—the desirable ores are often mixed up with those of little commercial value, and the problem is to obtain the desired ore free from those of lesser worth. For many years now, largely due to the initiative of Australian workers, it has been possible to find organic substances which, when added to a suspension of mixed ores, pick out the desired one, and (when air is bubbled into the system) float it to the surface, from which it can be raked off, i.e., separated and made available for chemical or electrochemical extraction of the metal. It turns out that the basis of this mineral flotation technology involves the Wagner and Traud mixed-potential concept and is thus indirectly related to corrosion theory. 

Although the author believes that the generalized concept was originally responsible for the electrochemical treatment of corrosion processes by the early workers, it appears that Hammett and Lorch (23) and Frumkin (24) were among the first to specifically describe metallic dissolution according to this concept. Wagner and Traud (16) showed that the electrode kinetics for hydrogen evolution are not affected by the simultaneous dissolution of the metallic ions. 

Solid materials, in general, are more or less subject to corrosion in the environments where they stand, and materials corrosion is one of the most troublesome problems we have been frequently confronted with in the current industrialized world. In the past decades, corrosion science has steadily contributed to the understanding of materials corrosion and its prevention. Modem corrosion science of materials is rooted in the local cell model of metallic corrosion proposed by Evans [1] and in the mixed electrode potential concept of metallic corrosion proved by Wagner and Traud [2]. These two magnificent achievements have combined into what we call the electrochemical theory of metallic corrosion. It describes metallic corrosion as a coupled reaction of anodic metal dissolution and cathodic oxidant reduction. The electrochemical theory of corrosion can be applied not only to metals but also to other solid materials. 

Electrode kinetics is the study of reaction rates at the interface between an electrode and a liquid. The science of electrode kinetics has made possible many advances in the understanding of corrosion and the practical measurement of corrosion rates. The interpretation of corrosion processes by superimposing electrochemical partial processes was developed by Wagner and Traud [1]. Important concepts of electrode kinetics that wifi be introduced in this chapter are the corrosion potential (also called the mixed potential and the rest potential), corrosion current density, exchange current density, and Tafel slope. The treatment of electrode kinetics in this book is, of necessity, elementary and directed toward application of corrosion science. For more detailed discussion of electrode kinetics, the reader should refer to specialized texts Usted at the end of the chapter. 

The main concept that most of the corrosion data interpretation is based on was first introduced by Wagner and Traud (1938), according to which galvanic corrosion is an electrochemical process with anodic and cathodic reactions taking place as statistically distributed events at the corroding surface. The corresponding partial anodic and cathodic currents are balanced so that the overall current density is zero. This concept has proven to be very useful, since it allowed all aspects of corrosion to be included into the framework of electrochemical kinetics. Directly deduced from this were the methods of corrosion rate measurement by Tafel line extrapolation, or the determination of the polarization resistance Rp from the slope of the polarization curve at the open circuit corrosion potential... 

This equation was first postulated empirically by Wagner and Traud (1938). In Eq. (7-26), b+ and b are the slopes of the Tafel lines of the anodic and cathodic partial reactions. The fundamentals of polarization resistance measurements have been described in more detail by Mansfeld (1976). This concept has also been adopted for the interpretation of EIS (Mansfeld, 1981 Mansfeld et al., 1982). For the simplest case of a purely reaction controlled corrosion process, the Faraday impedance Zp in Fig. 7-3 may be replaced by a potential dependent charge transfer resistance / (( ), which is composed of the charge transfer resistances of the anodic and cathodic partial reactions. At the corrosion potential, the polarization resistance corresponds to Rp = R (Eco ) Th overall impedance of the equivalent circuit in Fig. 7-3 can then be described by... 

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