The intrinsic mechanism of corrosion resistance for FCC high entropy alloys

The concept of high entropy alloys (HEAs) or multi-principal component alloys has inspired a great progress of physical metallurgy along with several unusual phenomena. The high corrosion resistance of HEAs was frequently mentioned but without convincing explanations. In this paper, the intrinsic mechanism of corrosion resistance in FCC HEAs was revealed by designing equal atomic alloys with single solid solution phase. The results showed that the Cr element in FCC HEAs played the dominant role in the corrosion resistance rather than the simple structure from high entropy effect or uniform element distribution.