| Both inorganic scale and corrosion continue to represent serious and expensive problems in industrial water and oil-and-gas producing systems. Water borne scale is responsible for many equipment failures, production losses, and radioactive exposures. Uncontrolled corrosion may cause fluid leaks; even small leaks are unacceptable due to stringent environmental and safety laws. Mineral scale and corrosion processes are intertwined, so one need discern the relationships that exist between scale and corrosion to control each effectively.; In scale control studies, the use of chelating agents as dissolvers for the removal of mineral scale has been investigated. In these studies, Scanning Force Microscopy (SFM) has been employed ex-situ and in-situ to study the interfacial reactions between dissolver solutions and barium sulfate (barite) surfaces. These complementary results have (a) elucidated the dissolution mechanisms of barite in dissolver solutions, (b) provided useful information for computer simulation to explain the mechanism between the surface atomic structure of scale and a dissolver's conformation, and (c) served as a guideline for appropriate selection of dissolvers for practical use.; The application of corrosion inhibitors has increased in recent years, becoming one of the most common methods for corrosion control. The studies herein focused on the observations of corrosion processes at the microscopic level in fluids with and without corrosion inhibitors via ex-situ SFM. The adsorption process of an inhibitor at the metal (oxides)–liquid interface was characterized by X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS). Knowledge derived from this research contributes to our understanding of the corrosion processes of metal (oxides), with and without the presence of inhibitors.; Microscopic-level understanding of scale dissolution, corrosion inhibition, and other environmental processes will help environmental engineers to build more realistic and effective models for phenomena that occur at solid-liquid interfaces. Although a great deal of knowledge has already been obtained at the macroscopic level from classical, solution chemical and bulk solid analysis, the advent of surface in-situ and ex-situ analytical techniques can provide new insights on an atomic scale into a wide range of processes important to environmental engineering. |
