Auden Ti Yun

Imagine an ideal summer day, perfect for a bike ride to the nearest beach or even a tour around your neighbourhood.  You prepare a quick picnic meal, pack your gear, step out of your house and head towards your bike… Only to find large spots of reddish-brown rust splattered all over your trusty steed! Here, you might feel unnerved, perhaps annoyed. After all, you’ve only just removed these pesky rust a couple of months ago. You are, unfortunately, not alone in your plight. Globally, the annual cost of corrosion (which rust is a part of) amounts to approximately 4% of the global GDP.

Corrosion is a destructive process with a large societal impact, and therefore has been studied for centuries. This has led to modern day applications such as in fuel cells, electrolysers (e.g. oxygen production in the International Space Station), and corrosion-resistant materials. So, what’s next?

Most corrosion studies so far have been extremely successful, but they are based on traditional, indirect methods. These methods lack sensitivity to the chemical changes happening on metal surfaces when the corrosion process occurs. The goal of my project is to study these metal surfaces during the corrosion process (in operando conditions). This is achieved by bridging traditional methods with modern X-Ray spectroscopy techniques. The aim of this project is to obtain novel information, and better understand, these corrosion processes on the atomic scale.