Long-Term Corrosion Protection of a Cupro-Nickel Alloy Due to Graphene Coating

This study demonstrates the corrosion resistance of a Cu-Ni alloy coated with a multi-layer graphene. This is one of the first demonstrations of long-term corrosion resistance due to graphene coating, which is crucial since earlier studies have suggested graphene-coated copper to be considerably inferior to bare copper in terms of corrosion during long-term exposure to a corrosive environment. The inferior corrosion resistance of graphene-coated copper arises due to defects and poor surface coverage by graphene. Since it is prohibitively difficult to develop defect-free graphene on metals at a commercially feasible scale, this study investigated the hypothesis for an alternative approach, i.e., to develop multi-layer graphene with a reasonable assumption that the areas of defects/poor coverage of a layer will be masked by the subsequent over-layer(s). This study has validated this hypothesis. Electrochemical investigations have demonstrated multi-layer graphene to improve the corrosion resistance of a Cu-Ni alloy by an order of magnitude. However, the most striking finding of this study is that the improvement in corrosion resistance due to the multi-layer graphene coating sustained the entire duration of a long-term test (~350 h).