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Articles

CJPLS: VOL. 13, NO. 2, DECEMBER 2025

Investigating the mixture of a benzotriazole and potassium iodide as efficient inhibitor against acid corrosion of 70Cu–30Ni alloy

Submitted
May 12, 2025
Published
2025-07-25

Abstract

Industrial heat exchangers and cooling systems usually develop scales on their internal walls, which impede fluid flow, diminish their thermal conductivities and, hence, their efficiencies. Restoring these qualities requires pickling with acid solutions, especially, HCl which forms very soluble products of scales. Without adding efficient corrosion inhibitor chemicals to the pickling solutions, serious corrosion attack on the substrates accompanies the acid pickling process. Identifying prospective corrosion inhibitor chemicals with green environmental profile and high efficiencies becomes imperative for many industries. Herein, we employed weight loss, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and potentiodynamic polarization (PDP) to investigate the mixture of 5–methyl–1H–benzotriazole (5MB) and potassium iodide (KI) as efficient corrosion inhibitor systems for heat exchanger-type alloy (70Cu-30Ni) against corrosion in 1 M HCl solution. The addition of KI boosts the inhibition efficiency of 5MB from ≈74 % to ≈96 %. The 5MB + KI mixture impacts a strong anodic shift in corrosion potential (Ecorr) and boosts the passivation of the alloy. The inhibitor mixture is also very efficient to diminish the extent of surface microstructural degradation of the alloy, based on characterizations by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).

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