Question

What is corrosion in simple words?

Answer 1

Corrosion: Corrosion is the process of slowly eating up metals by gas and water vapours present in the atmosphere due to the formation of certain compounds like oxide, sulphides, carbonate, etc.

Example: Tarnishing of silver utensils:

• When Silver utensils are exposed to air, they react with the Sulphur gas present in the atmosphere which leads to the formation of silver sulphide which is black in colour.
• The chemical reaction can be represented as:

$\underset{\mathrm{Silver}}{2\mathrm{Ag}\left(\mathrm{s}\right)}+\underset{\mathrm{Hydrogen}\mathrm{sulphide}}{{\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{S}\left(\mathrm{g}\right)}\to \underset{\mathrm{Silver}\mathrm{sulphide}}{{\mathrm{Ag}}_2\mathrm{S}\left(\mathrm{s}\right)}+\underset{\mathrm{Hydrogen}}{{\mathrm{H}}_2\left(\mathrm{g}\right)}$