Corrosion
of metallic substrates is a problem for a variety of
applications. Corrosion can be mitigated with the use of an electrically
insulating coating protecting the substrate. Thick millimetric coatings,
such as paints, are generally more corrosion-resistant when compared
to nanoscale coatings. However, for thermal systems, thick coatings
are undesirable due to the resulting decrease in the overall heat
transfer stemming from the added coating thermal resistance. Hence,
the development of ultrathin (<10 μm) coatings is of great
interest. Ultrathin inorganic silicon dioxide (SiO2) coatings
applied by sol–gel chemistries or chemical vapor deposition,
as well as organic coatings such as Parylene C, have great anticorrosion
performance due to their high dielectric breakdown and low moisture
permeability. However, their application to arbitrarily shaped metals
is difficult or expensive. Here, we develop a sol–gel solution
capable of facile and controllable dip coating on arbitrary metals,
resulting in a very smooth (<5 nm roughness), thin (∼3 μm),
and conformal coating of dense SiO2. To benchmark our material,
we compared the corrosion performance with in-house synthesized superhydrophobic
aluminum and copper samples, Parylene C-coated substrates, and smooth
hydrophobic surfaces functionalized with a hydrophobic self-assembled
monolayer. For comparison with state-of-the-art commercial coatings,
copper substrates were coated with an organo-ceramic SiO2 layer created by an elevated temperature and atmospheric pressure
metal organic chemical vapor deposition process. To characterize corrosion
performance, we electrochemically investigated the corrosion resistance
of all samples through potentiodynamic polarization studies and electrochemical
impedance spectroscopy. To benchmark the coating durability and to
demonstrate scalability, we tested internally coated copper tubes
in a custom-built corrosion flow loop to simulate realistic working
conditions with shear and particulate saltwater flow. The sol–gel
and Parylene C coatings demonstrated a 95% decrease in corrosion rate
during electrochemical tests. Copper tube weight loss was reduced
by 75% for the sol–gel SiO2-coated tubes when seawater
was used as the corrosive fluid in the test loop. This work not only
demonstrates scalable coating methodologies for applying ultrathin
anticorrosion coatings but also develops mechanistic understanding
of corrosion mechanisms on a variety of functional surfaces and substrates.