A novel epoxy coating with nanocatalytic anticorrosion performance achieved by single-atom Fe-N-C catalyst

In view of the critical importance of oxygen to corrosion evolution, to starve corrosion via depleting oxy-gen in coatings is a promising strategy. In this work, a novel nanocatalytic anticorrosion concept is pro-posed to design new coating with outstanding corrosion resistance. Different from the passive barrier of traditional coatings and self-repair after corrosion of current stimuli-feedback coatings, such coating could spontaneously eliminate internal diffused oxygen and greatly suppress the corrosion process. As a proof of concept, single-atom Fe-N-C electrocatalyst with isolated FeN4 active sites is synthesized by a simple confined carbonization method, exhibiting excellent oxygen reduction performance (E1/2 = 0.902 V). In composite coating, the evenly dispersed Fe-N-C compensates for the coating defects and serves as oxygen scavengers, which could actively adsorb and consume ambient oxygen, thereby pre-venting oxygen penetration to the metal substrate surface, eliminating the oxygen contribution to corro-sion and significantly boosting the anticorrosion performance of epoxy coating. This in-situ mediation for oxygen in coating prevents metal substrate from receiving new supply of oxygen, while imparting active anticorrosion property to the coating.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This article proposes a novel nanocatalytic anticorrosion concept to design new coatings with excellent corrosion resistance by depleting oxygen in the coating. The coating can spontaneously eliminate internal diffused oxygen and greatly suppress the corrosion process, providing active anticorrosion property to the metal substrate surface.