MIC of carbon steel in Amazonian environment: Electrochemical, biological and surface analyses

• The discussion is correlating electrochemical, chemical and biological analyses.
• Immersed carbon steel corrosion is studied on short term, 10–50 days.
• Increase in corrosion rate is related to decrease of charge transfer resistance.
• There are manganese oxides and iron sulphide after 30 days on the surface.
• Bacterial biofilm: dominance switching from β-proteobacteria to α-proteobacteria.

In this study, the corrosion of S355 carbon steel was monitored for 50 days in equatorial environment. The experiments were conducted under three complementary approaches in a natural environment: (i) bacterial diversity was assessed with Miseq sequencing, (ii) observations of the surface and identifications of deposit compounds were realised with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Raman spectrometry and EDX analyses, (iii) electrochemical measurements were used to calculate corrosion rate and to identify the phenomena which control corrosion. The results showed that the bacterial population had changed over immersion time from a dominance of β-proteobacteria to α-proteobacteria. This evolution decreased charge transfer resistance at the metal/deposit from 41.6 to 20.8 Ω/cm2 in 50 days, caused an increase in the corrosion rate by a factor of 2, from 0.13 to 0.27 mm/year. Surface analyses showed a progressive appearance of MIC markers in the deposit such as iron sulphide and manganese oxides that were detected after 30 days of immersion in the natural environment. In conclusion, this study describes in detail, the first stage of MIC activity on carbon steel surface in an equatorial brackish water, under aerobic conditions.