The corrosion protection of low carbon steel in 2.5 M HCl solution by kiwi juice was studied at different temperatures and immersion times by weight loss technique. To study the determination of the optimum conditions from statistical design in evaluation of a corrosion inhibitor, three variables, were considered as the most dominant variables. These variables are: temperature, inhibitor concentration (extracted kiwi juice) and immersion time at static conditions.
These three variables are manipulated through the experimental work using central composite rotatable Box – Wilson Experimental Design (BWED) where second order polynomial model was proposed to correlate the studied variables with the corrosion rate of low carbon steel alloy to estimate the coefficients by nonlinear regression analysis method based on Rosenbrock and Quasi-Newton estimation method in as few experiments as possible to determinate of the optimum conditions of the proposed polynomial adopted via STATISTICA software. The parametric study on corrosion inhibition process using response surface methodology (RSM) is presented in this paper.
The study shows that the immersion time and temperature of corroding medium had shown negative dependence of great significance in increase the corrosion rate while the other studied variable (i.e. inhibitor concentration) had shown large positive dependence in reduce the corrosion rate of low carbon steel alloy.
Optimum conditions for achieving the minimum corrosion rate are obtained from optimizing the above correlation and are found as follow: 42.86 °C temperature of corroding medium, 29.29 cm3/L inhibitor concentration and 2.65 h immersion time. In these circumstances, the value of inhibition efficiency obtained was 96.09 %. It could be concluded that Box-Wilson experimental design was adequately applicable in the optimization of process variables and that kiwi juice sufficiently inhibited the corrosion for low carbon steel at the conditions of the experiment.