Anticorrosion effect of a green sustainable inhibitor on mild steel in hydrochloric acid.

Green inhibitors are an important way to decrease the corrosion rate of different industrial metals. The present work shows the corrosion behavior of the mild steel medium (MS) in hydrochloric acid 1 M by the aqueous extract of Artemisia Herba Alba (AHA), which is an green sustainable inhibitor to reduce its corrosive action by exploiting a variety of techniques and methods namely: Weight loss, electrochemical techniques [electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and potentiodynamic polarization (PDP], SEM-EDX, XPS and theoretical calculations for the majority molecule. Hydrodistillation is the extraction method that has been used to prepare the aqueous extracts. Otherwise, phytochemical screening characterization of different parts of the plant was applied to show the proportions of chemical compounds that exist in the plants. The highest inhibition efficiency obtained is 92% for 0.4 g/L of AHA aqueous extract in 1 M HCl at 303 K. PDP study confirmed that the AHA extract is of mixed-kind inhibitor. A CPE, Q determined by fit and graphical methods plotted by synthetic data, was utilized. To characterize the mild steel surface, scanning electron microscopy was also used; SEM/EDX allowed the investigation of the AHA effect on the surface of mild steel specimens. To comprehend the adsorption mechanism of AHA extract for MS in the 1 M HCl, XPS technique was accomplished. Theoretical approaches based on chemical quantum calculations and molecular dynamics simulation clearly explains the mode of adsorption of the majority molecule on the iron surface.