The Influence of Irradiated Defect Structures on the Corrosion Behaviour of Nickel

The focus of the present study is to evaluate the influence of different material structures on the corrosion behavior on high purity Nickel (99.999%). Four different structural states have been investigated in chloride containing solutions. Highly defected structures were obtained by irradiation of a single crystal with Ni+-ions with 7.5 MeV fluency beam. The behavior of grain boundary defects of sputtered nanocrystalline films (grain size ~ 50 nm) were compared with the behavior of a single crystal [100]. Electrochemical polarization curves showed that the different structural defects led to different passive current densities. Furthermore, microelectrochemical measurements revealed that chemical defects get activated at lower potentials than structural defects of grain boundaries and irradiation sites.