Development and Performance Evaluation of a Mini-potentiostat for Corrosion Experimentations

The exorbitant cost of laboratory equipment is chiefly responsible for the dearth of corrosion characterization equipment in material science laboratories of Universities from Sub-Saharan Africa and that of other developing countries across the globe. It has therefore become germane to exploit available resources for development of affordable potentiostat within the university community. In this work, detailed procedure and working principles for design, fabrication and performance evaluation of a portable and inexpensive microcontroller-based potentiostat are presented. PROTEUS® software was used for the design of the parent circuit board. Graphical User Interface (GUI) developed using Visual Studio and Origin PRO Software was used for acquisition of experimental results. Performance evaluation of the potentiostat was implemented by performing corrosion experiments in 5 wt.% NaCl solution using mild steel as a working electrode (WE). Ag/AgCl reference electrode (RE) was used as well as Platinum wire as the counter electrode (CE). The analysis of the working electrode potential against the log of current-density plot at a scan rate of 10 mV/s of the fabricated potentiostat revealed a Tafel plot that is in conformity with results from commercially available potentiostats.