The study of pitting potentials for some austenitic stainless steels using a potentiodynamic technique

A potentiostatic sweep technique at 1 mV s1, which had previously been developed, has been used to determine the pitting potentials of several stainless type steels in chloride-containing saline waters. Using 3% chloride as a norm the effect of temperature and several second anions such as nitrate, hydroxyl, sulphate, carbonate and chromate have been investigated. The technique gives self-consistent data whose trends are similar to those reported in the literature using other polarization techniques, thus supporting its adoption as a routine test method.