Toward the development of an innovative descaling and corrosion inhibiting solutions to protect mild steel equipment: an experimental and theoretical approach

This work proposes a mixture of sulfamic and perchloric acids as a descaling solution and cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) and imidazole for the improvement in the corrosion resistance of mild steel. The experiments were carried out at different temperatures using mass loss and electrochemical techniques. The samples were characterized by inductively coupled plasma spectrometry, SEM-EDS, and X-ray diffraction techniques. The study showed that CTAB and imidazole can serve as the efficient corrosion inhibitors for mild steel in descaling solution and were found to follow the model of Langmuir adsorption isotherm. Potentiodynamic polarization was performed at temperature 295, 305, 315, and 325 K, and it can be concluded that the CTAB/imidazole acted as mixed type corrosion inhibitors. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy studies revealed that increase in imidazole concentration, resulted into the increased polarization resistance with simultaneous lowering of double-layer capacitance values. Computational techniques were used to support experimental results.