Microstructural and chemical characterization of MIC products from stainless steel probes in seawater using SEM and AFM techniques

The use of electron microscopy techniques have various applications in the corrosion research. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and the chemical analysis of the corrosion products are commonly found in the corrosion related literature. Also, microstructural characterizations based on transmisión electron microscopy (TEM) and electron diffraction patterns are widely used. More recent microscopy techniques such as the atomic force microscopy (AFM) have also been used for corrosion research. One of the main advantages of this technique is that allows to perform microscopy observations in situ during corrosion experiments. In this work some application of these techniques to the study of microbiologically induced corrosion (MIC) of stainless steel in natural seawater are presented.