title: XPS investigation on the surface chemistry of corrosion products on ZnMgAl-coated steel.
abstract: In this work, a novel evaluation strategy for the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) chemical assessment is proposed to identify the corrosion products formed on the surface of hot-dip galvanized ZnMgAl coatings after exposure to standardized salt spray tests. The experiments demonstrate that the investigated system exhibits a problematic differential charging behavior between the different compounds, an effect which cannot be fully compensated for by the flood gun of the XPS system, making a reliable evaluation of the individual spectra impossible by using standard evaluation and fitting methods. For that reason, a new effective approach--taking the different charge shifts into account--was implemented and its reliability experimentally verified on model mixtures of assumed corrosion products with known composition. With this new approach, the chemical surface composition of an industrial sample of a corroded ZnMgAl coating was revealed and discussed in order to clearly demonstrate the potential of the proposed method for future corrosion studies.
authors.affiliation: Christian Doppler Laboratory for Microscopic and Spectroscopic Material Characterization, Center for Surface and Nanoanalysis, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Altenbergerstraße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria. jiri.duchoslav@jku.at
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Duchoslav
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Arndt
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Keppert
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Luckeneder
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Stifter