Corrosion wear synergistic behavior of Hastelloy C276 alloy in artificial seawater

A systematic investigation was carried out to discuss the corrosion and tribocorrosion behaviors of Hastelloy C276 alloy sliding against Al2O3 pin in artificial seawater, using a pin-on-disk tribometer integrated with a potentiostat for electrochemical control. The results show that the great decrease of open circuit potential and three orders of magnitude increase of corrosion current density occur caused by friction. There are clearly synergistic effect between corrosion and wear, resulting in corrosion-induced-wear and wear-induced-corrosion in tribocorrosion process. The contribution of pure mechanical wear to total material loss exceeds 70% in all sliding conditions, so mechanical wear is the dominant factor during tribocorrosion. For considering synergistic effect between corrosion and wear, the contribution of wear-induced-corrosion to total material loss is not very high although corrosion rate is greatly accelerated by friction. The fraction of corrosion-induced-wear to the total material loss is high and in the range of 14.6%-20.5% under all sliding conditions.