Revisiting a minimally destructive analytic approach for determining electrochemical kinetic parameters: Measuring aluminum corrosion across a wide pH range based on the Butler-Volmer equation

Abstract

This study revisits the three-point sampling of the simplified Butler-Volmer equation to address the limitations of strong potentiodynamic polarization, which can introduce irreversible damage and uncertainty in corrosion analysis. The method extracts electrochemical kinetic parameters while minimizing polarization effects, evaluates noise sensitivity relative to overpotential, and accounts for errors from signal noise, OCP drift, ohmic resistance, and mass-transfer constraints. Verified against the Tafel extrapolation method for aluminum corrosion across a wide pH range, this low-polarization approach enables accurate evaluations with specific error estimates, offering a robust alternative to linear polarization resistance methods that assume constant Tafel slopes.