Employing corn derived products to reduce the corrosivity of pavement deicing materials

The goal of this study is to reduce the corrosivity of traditional pavement deicers by employing environmentally safe and low-cost corn-derived polyols namely sorbitol, mannitol, and maltitol. The corrosion inhibition performance of polyols-mixed deicers is investigated for ASTM A572 Gr. 50 high strength low alloy steels. For this purpose, each polyol is added to the traditional deicer (23.0% wt. sodium chloride brine) in the following weight concentrations: 0.5%, 1.0%, 2.0% and 3.0%. The corrosion behavior of ASTM A572 Gr. 50 high strength low alloy steel is then quantified by conducting potentiodynamic polarization tests in the absence and presence of different polyols concentrations in the deicing solution. In addition to the polarization tests, accelerated corrosion tests are performed by continuously subjecting ASTM A572 Gr. 50 steel specimens to the periodic flow of polyols-based deicers in a hot and humid environment inside an environmental chamber to visually monitor the corrosion damage in steel specimens. The results obtained from both polarization tests and accelerated corrosion tests revealed that the addition of small concentrations of corn-derived polyols in the traditional salt brine deicer leads to substantial corrosion inhibition (up to 92%) in the ASTM A572 Gr. 50 steel used in this study. All three polyols are observed to obey the Langmuir's adsorption isotherm and inhibit the corrosion in ASTM A572 Gr. 50 steels through physical adsorption on the steel surface. The potentiodynamic polarization test results further indicated the mixed-type corrosion inhibiting nature of polyols-based deicing solutions.