Investigation on the Cathodic Protection Effect of Low Pressure Cold Sprayed AlZn Coating in Seawater via Numerical Simulation

Cold spray can deposit a composite coating simply by spraying mechanically-mixed Al and Zn powders, while no quantitative data has been reported on the anti-corrosion performance of different composite cold-sprayed coatings. In the present work, the finite element method was used to estimate the cathodic protection effect by simulating the potential distribution on a damaged cold-sprayed AlZn coating on Q235 steel. The results indicate that AlZn coating can only provide a limiting cathodic protection for substrate, because it can only polarize a very narrow zone negative to −0.78 V (vs. SCE, saturated calomel electrode). The remaining area of the steel substrate still has a very high residual corrosion rate. Computational methods can be used to predict the corrosion rate of AlZn coating, and the simulation results were validated by the results of a weight loss experiment.