> That is what makes the finding so striking. Manganese is usually not viewed as a friend of stainless steel corrosion resistance. In fact, the prevailing view has been that manganese weakens it.
> "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.
So apart from the clickbait, the reason why this is interesting is because it's a limiter for the often cited idea of clean green hydrogen from electrolyis. The current use of titanium and precious metals is, obviously, really expensive, so it's uneconomical to build something that only runs on "spare" electricity.
I don't think the efficiency or longevity of electrolysis equipment is the limiting factor...
The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to make blue hydrogen is really easy at scale, and gives off CO2 which is useful for injection into wells to increase production. That sets a price ceiling of hydrogen.
At the other end of the scale, there are batteries to store 'free' electricity and resell later. That sets a floor price of electricity.
Between the floor price of the input and ceiling price of the output, there is no room for electrolysis, even at 100% efficiency, unless government policies mandate it or restrict batteries or blue hydrogen.
There's one case, rural areas often have abundant energy sources (hydro, wind,etc) but few consumers, in Northern Sweden f.ex. a lot is produced but there's a lot of losses in transporting the energy south.
Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap even with batteries so excess production could be redirected towards hydrogen production.
Galvanic corrosion typically happens at 0.5V (and as low as 0.15V in salt-water); 1.7V is "ultra high potential" in comparison with normal corrosion thresholds.
I think that may not be the potential used for electrolysis, but the chemical potential of the saltwater-metal boundary. But hopefully someone more knowledgeable will comment.
this kind of headline is bad for our collective souls; I know raging against the clickbait is old hat but seriously, this is ridiculous. Materials science is surely interesting enough to a reader of science direct without being SHOCKED and APPALLED all the time
> "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.
This is the Cannot be explained bit
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