4. Oxidation phenomenology

The Ellingham diagram (figure 2 ) shows that the dissolved oxygen content required for iron oxidation can only be achieved in pure lead and tin. The Pb-Bi eutectic also enables oxidation of steels. In this section, we will focus on the oxidation of steels by lead alloys.

The Handbook on Pb and Pb-Bi technology brings together most of the corrosion kinetics data on Pb and Pb-Bi in the literature. It shows that the two corrosion modes thermodynamically likely...