An important use of coating polymers is as the matrix of protective coating systems such as corrosion protective coatings of all types, and barrier coatings, in general, for metallic and non-metallic substrates.  These coatings must exhibit many different performance properties that are often difficult to characterize by standard methods of polymer characterization, and designing coating polymers.  Past work on using non-traditional methods for characterizing coating polymers, such as weight gain on immersion in water and transport properties such and diffusion coefficient, permeability and conductivity have proved helpful in designing and predicting  improved coating performance.  Past and more recent work in our laboratory has shown that using electrochemical methods for characterizing protective polymer film systems can provide significant new insights into predicting and understanding their performance.  Methods such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), electrochemical noise methods (ENM), and AC-DC-AC testing had shown themselves very useful in characterizing polymer films performance, especially when used in supplement to exposing polymer films to the more common accelerated test protocols such as electrolyte immersion, salt fog chamber exposure such as ASTM B117, and cyclic, wet-dry exposure chamber testing such as Prohesion� Cycling, can yield important new information upon which one can base the choice of a protective coating polymer system.  Further, more specialized exposure cycles such as thermal cycling or the use of room-temperature ionic liquids used in conjunction with EIS, ENM and other electrochemical tests have shown themselves capable of ranking very accurately the long-term protective performance of many types of polymer films.  Examples of past work at NDSU and more recent work performed  in conjunction with a polymers specifically synthesized to illustrate the value of electrochemical characterization will be shown, and the information gained from such measurements described and interpreted.

Electrochemical methods for characterizing and designing polymers and coatings

246th National Meeting (2013)

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