SYNCHROTRON INFRARED NANO-SPECTROSCOPY FOR NANO-SPECIATION OF METAL CORROSION PRODUCTS

The understanding of chemical and physical behavior of materials, especially metals and their alloys, is of utmost importance for industrial and technological applications, development of new materials and preservation of cultural heritage. The use of complementary analytical techniques has allowed a better understanding of corrosion mechanisms, and results obtained by Raman micro-spectroscopy, for example, have been complemented by FTIR and XRD. When focusing on the development of new materials and proposition of preservation strategies, the understanding of corrosion processes and of their very initial steps (nanometric scale) is fundamental. SERS reaches such lateral resolution if TERS is used, however, it cannot be universally applied and needs to be complemented by other techniques. In this work it is presented the potentials of a recent installed technique at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS), which can be used for nano-speciation of corrosion products, complementing investigation carried out by, for example, Raman micro-spectroscopy and TERS. It is Synchrotron Infrared Nano-Spectroscopy (SINS), which allows the investigation of both chemical nature and physical distribution of corrosion products. The infrastructure presented at LNLS is one of the few available in the world. As a model system, thin films of Pb exposed to formic acid were used.