The corrosion behaviour of commercial purity titanium processed by high-pressure torsion

Commercial purity (CP) titanium was processed by high-pressure torsion (HPT) under an applied pressure of 6.0 GPa for different numbers of torsional revolutions and then exposed to a 3.5 % NaCl solution for open-circuit potential measurements followed by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and potentiodynamic polarization tests. The electrochemical results exhibit a complicated relationship between the corrosion resistance and grain refinement. Thus, microhardness measurements reveal an improvement in hardness for CP titanium after processing by HPT but the corrosion resistance is lower in the NaCl solution than for the annealed coarse-grained Ti. It is shown that the corrosion susceptibility of the HPT-processed samples decreases with increasing torsional strain. The effect of grain size and microstructure on the corrosion properties of ultrafine-grained CP Ti is also examined.