Corrosion inhibitors

he use of corrosion inhibitors represents an important option for the control of corrosion processes and for providing corrosion protection to different metals. Inhibitors have been widely used for corrosion control. They can be employed in solution in order to control the aggressiveness of a corrosive media. Moreover, they can be deposited on metal substrates or incorporated in different types of pre-treatments and coatings in order to retard or possibly avoid the onset of corrosion. The effect of inhibitors and their protection mechanisms have been extensively considered in literature for several application fields. This chapter focuses on the effect of inhibitors on the electrochemical behavior of a metal substrate. The effect of the inhibitors can be classified according to their effect on partial electrochemical reactions, application field or reaction mechanism. These aspects are targeted in this chapter providing examples taken from different scientific papers in literature in order to provide experimental evidence of the working principle of the different inhibitors.