Inhibition of steel corrosion with imidazolium-based compounds – Experimental and theoretical study.

• Theory and experiment that explains the efficiency of the inhibitation of the imidazolium salts. • It clearly shows a significant difference between the alkyl chain versus functionalized group inhibition. • First-principles modelling review that the model of the free molecule is not capable to describe the electron transfer in inhibition process. • Charge transfer of the bromide and chloride imidazolium salts attached to Fe(110) surface unambitious show and explain the trend of the electron transfer for the increasing alkyl chain. This work aims to investigate the corrosion inhibition of the mild steel in the 1 M HCl solution by 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium hydrogen sulphate 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hydrogen sulphate, and 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride, using electrochemical, weight loss, and surface analysis methods as well as the full quantum-mechanical treatment. Polarization measurements prove that studied compounds are mixed-type inhibitors with a predominantly anodic reaction. The inhibition efficiency obtained from the polarization curves is about 80–92% for all of the 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium salts with a concentration higher than 0.005 mol/l, while it is much lower for 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hydrogen sulphate. The values measured in the weight loss experiments (after seven days) are to some extent higher (reaching up to 98% efficiency). Furthermore, we have shown that the influence of the alkyl chain length on the inhibition efficiency is much larger than that of the anion type. Furthermore, we obtain a realistic model of a single molecule on iron surface Fe(110) by applying the Density Functional Theory calculations. We use the state-of-the-art computational approach, including the meta-GGA strongly-constrained and appropriately normed semilocal density functional to model the electronic structure properties of both free and bounded-to-surface molecules of 1-butyl-, 1-hexyl-, and 1-octyl-3-methylimizadolium bromide, chloride, and hydrogen sulphate. From the calculations we extract, the HOMO/LUMO gap, hardness, electronegativity, and charge transfer of electrons from/to molecules-in-question. It supports the experimental findings and explains the influence of the alkyl chain length and the functional group on the inhibition process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]