Plant Extracts as Green Corrosion Inhibitors for Different Metal Surfaces and Corrosive Media: A Review

Natural extracts have been widely used to protect metal materials from corrosion. The efficiency of these extracts as corrosion inhibitors is commonly evaluated through electrochemical tests, which include techniques such as potentiodynamic polarization, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and weight loss measurement. The inhibition efficiency of different extract concentrations is a valuable indicator to obtain a clear outlook to choose an extract for a particular purpose. A complementary vision of the effectiveness of green extracts to inhibit the corrosion of metals is obtained by means of surface characterizations; atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis are experimental techniques widely used for this purpose. Moreover, theoretical studies are usually addressed to elucidate the nature of the corrosion inhibitor-metal surface interactions. In addition, calculations have been employed to predict how other organic substances behave on metal surfaces and to provide experimental work with fresh proposals. This work reports a broad overview of the current state of the art research on the study of new extracts as corrosion inhibitors on metal surfaces in corrosive media. Most constituents obtained from plant extracts are adsorbed on the metal, following the Langmuir adsorption model. Electron-rich regions and heteroatoms have been found to be responsible for chemisorption on the metal surface, whereas physisorption is due to the polar regions of the inhibitor molecules. The plant extracts compiled in this work obtained corrosion inhibition efficiencies above 60%, most of them around 80-90%. The effect of concentration, extraction solvent, temperature, and immersion time were studied as well. Additional studies regarding plant extracts as corrosion inhibitors on metals are needed to produce solutions for industrial purposes.