Field of Research:
Materials Engineering
In Germany:
01.11.2004 -
31.05.2005
Host's project description
Professor Frankel has become one of the leaders of the corrosion field. Professor Frankel's specialty is corrosion, the environmental degradation of materials. He has been active in many different areas of corrosion science: hydrogen embrittlement, pitting corrosion, passivity, corrosion of magnetic and electronic materials, stress corrosion cracking, and corrosion of welds. Throughout his career he has distinguished himself as an experimental innovator, developing new approaches that led to enhanced fundamental understanding of the concepts and phenomena. His work on metastable pitting of stainless steel is one of the most-reference papers in the important area of localized corrosion, and Professor Frankel is recognized as a world leader in pitting. In recent years, Professor Frankel's work has focused largely on the corrosion and inhibition of corrosion in high strength Al alloys related to the field of aging aircraft. He pioneered the use of an interesting new technique, Scanning Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy, in the area of corrosion. SKPFM provides information on the location of local anodes and cathodes with a sub-micron lateral resolution, which is critical in understanding the behavior of high strength aluminum alloys. Professor Frankel is using the Humboldt Foundation award to support research at the Max Planck Institut für Eisenforschung in collaboration with Professor Martin Stratmann. In this work, Professor Frankel and Professor Stratmann are making advances in the use of the Kelvin Probe technique, which Professor Stratmann pioneered in the area of corrosion. They will use this method to make electrochemical measurements under thin layers of electrolyte on passive metals that are susceptible to localized corrosion. The ultimate application of the work is for long term nuclear waste storage, which is being planned at a site in Nevada called Yucca Mountain in the USA. Corrosion of the waste canisters is a critical issue in predicting their integrity over the design lifetime of at least 10,000 years. A considerable amount of work has already been performed evaluating the suitability of various materials. However, all of the electrochemical measurements have been made in bulk electrolytes. The work of Professor Frankel and Professor Stratmann will be the first electrochemical experiments ever performed on localized corrosion in thin electrolyte layers and should be instrumental in predicting the long term corrosion resistance of canister materials.
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Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Ohio State University
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