Corrosion behaviour of ductile cast irons partially modified with silicon in 0.03 M NaCl

The increasing demand of ductile cast irons with extensive technological applications leads to enlarge the corrosion resistance of this group of metallic materials. In this sense, the use of different chemical compositions on such cast irons becomes one of the most interesting aspects among the different ways to improve their behaviour against corrosion due to the extra opportunity for increasing the mechanical properties. Additionally such improvements have to be made without any increase of processing costs to keep the interesting competitiveness of developed cast irons. In the present work the preliminary results obtained from corrosion tests made on a group of cast irons with different chemical compositions are presented. Among ductile cast irons, silicon content has been varied in order to investigate the effect of this element on corrosion resistance of the alloys. The obtained results show a slight improvement of this property for the alloys with high silicon content with respect to the conventional ones though such effect was found in the first time period of the corrosion tests. Interestingly this improvement was found for alloys that exhibit better tensile properties than the conventional ductile irons. Thus an important way for developing new ductile cast irons with improved corrosion properties by alloying has been opened.