Development And Application Of Virtual Potentiostat For Electrochemical Corrosion Measurement

With the development of high technology and the progress of society, the computertechnique grows rapidly, the standard bus, network and software also has become themain trends of the future testing and instruments technology,the Virtual instrumenttecheni is being more and more valued both in the industrial and academic circles,ithas become an important direction of the development of automatic test and electronicmeasurement instrument technique. The rapid development of the virtual instrumenttechnology provides an important approach for the advancement of modern testtechnology. With the introduction of virtual instrument technology in electrochemicalcorrosion testing technology, we can enhance the flexibility of traditional equipmentand rapidly customize special testing system and reduce research equipmentinvestment.Potentiostat is one of the most important basic equipments in the study ofcorrosion electrochemistry, it is very important to research the application of virtualtechnology on potentiostats. Virtual potentiostat can realize its main functions bysoftware instead of complexed hardware, it not only could meet the demand ofvarious ways to do the electrochemical tests, but also is more flexible and simple inthe structure and parameters. That means a lot in the development of virtualelectrochemical corrosion instruments. In this paper, a virtual potentiostatmeasurement system VEC11-A (virtual electrochemical corrosion test system) basedon LabVIEW has been designed. We used the virtual instrument system ofpotentiostat based on the proportion-integration-differentiation (PID) controltechnology under LabVIEW2010programming platform to realize the measurementof corrosion potential, polarization curves, linear polarization curves, cyclicvoltammetry curves, dynamic potential anode passivation curves, and constantpotential step curves in different conditions such as sulfuric acid solution,sodium chloride solution, tap water and corrosion inhibitor. By contrast with normalelectrochemical instrument, the system worked well for electrolyzers with differentimpedance.