Investigation of anti-corrosion property of hybrid coatings fabricated by combining PEC with MAO on pure magnesium

Novel hybrid coatings on pure magnesium were prepared by combining plasma electrolytic carburizing (PEC) with micro-arc oxidation (MAO) to further enhance the anti-corrosion property in this paper. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to observe the micro-structure of the coatings, meanwhile, energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were separately used to investigate the elemental as well as phase compositions of the coatings. The anti-corrosion property of the coatings was evaluated by potentiodynamic polarization curves as well as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS).The results show that PEC process is closely related with the effects of adsorption as well as diffusion of the activated carbon atoms, and it can provide a favorable pretreatment surface with predesigned chemical composition to obtain a new kind of phase, namely SiC with superior corrosion resistance and chemical stability, in the following PEC+MAO hybrid coatings. Meanwhile, PEC preprocessing also can afford an excellent micro-structure to increase the coating thickness as well as to improve the compactness of the PEC+MAO hybrid coatings. During the fabrication process of the PEC+MAO hybrid coatings, an overlapping phenomenon in regard to coating thickness can be observed instead of heaping up layer by layer. Compared with both single PEC surface modification layers as well as single MAO coatings, the PEC+MAO hybrid coatings exhibit more superior anti-corrosion property. Especially, the EIS data reveal that the PEC+MAO hybrid coatings can act as an effective protection system to provide relatively excellent long-range anti-corrosion protection. Note also that employing same MAO technique for both single MAO treatment as well as PEC+MAO combining procedure is the key to this research.