Project
Due to COVID-19 uncertainties related to laboratory access, this project aims at allowing you to work your steps back from a set of raw data in order to build back the project objectives and results.
A set of electrochemical data, which relates to a material degradation environment, is provided. These were registered using a standard three-electrode cell setup relying on a silver-silver chloride reference electrode and a platinum auxiliary electrode.
The aim of the project is to analyse the raw data provided to answer the below questions in a way that you are able to complete/populate each of the project sections.
• What is the environment in question? Where do we encounter it? Why is it a problem? (Atmosphere, temperature, pH etc.)
• What is the material being degraded? How can we know that? Why do we use this material and not a more robust material?
• Are there any chemicals/corrosion by-layers affecting the material degradation signature? Anything forming on the surface? How does it affect the material degradation? Write this using chemical equations.
• Are there any added chemicals that are interfering with the material degradation process? How can we see that from the data provided or analysed?
• What are the chemical analysis tools provided and what information do they provide?
• What analysis tool is/are missing to confirm the chemical structure of your system?
• What are the electrochemical tools used to assess the material degradation?
This will be part of your literature review and material and methods section [electrochemical setup, when do we use it? what does it inform us about?]
• You will need to use the data to plot the adequate graphs from all techniques implemented in order to follow-up material degradation versus time.
• Be aware that not all data provided might be useful; you might need to make choices about the data that is valuable to plot and which is not; this should be discussed with your supervisor.
• Some data might need additional software, freeware to be analysed; you will need to do a research to uncover that and discuss with your supervisor its implementation.
• Additional surface analysis images are provided and can be used to ascertain your results/conclusions.