ABSTRACT
In early studies, the potential application of conducting polymers (CPs) in anticorrosion technology was investigated using mainly CP coatings as a primer alone or as a primer with conventional topcoats (Sitaram et al., 1997; Spinks et al., 2002; Tallman et al., 2002; Zarras et al., 2003). CP layers of a desired thickness were deposited on the metal surface either directly by utilizing electrochemical techniques such as cyclic voltammetry, potentiostatic and galvanostatic electropolymerization, or via a two-step process where a chemically synthesized CP was first dispersed/dissolved in a proper solvent and then applied, mainly by casting, on the metal. Although today, many studies still examine the protective properties of CP coating as primers to understand the factors influencing their protective performance and clarify the anticorrosion mechanism induced by CPs, several other configurations were developed to apply CPs on metal surfaces for anticorrosion purposes. Examples of such advanced configurations of CP-based coatings are multilayered CPs with suitable dopants-inhibitors and composites/nanocomposites (NCs) (Deshpande et al., 2014; Zarras & Stenger-Smith, 2014).
