Passive Film Breakdown & Pitting Corrosion Nucleation

Stainless steels, aluminum and titanium resist corrosion because a nanometre-thin passive oxide film self-heals across their surface — but chloride ions can locally break that film down, triggering stochastic pit nucleation at inclusions and grain-boundary defects. This simulator renders a metal surface as a live 3D grid: raise the applied potential toward the chloride-dependent pitting potential and watch weak sites nucleate pits that either autocatalytically grow (occluded, acidified pit cavities dissolving via anodic Tafel kinetics) or metastably repassivate and arrest. Controls for potential, chloride concentration, temperature and inclusion density map directly onto the point-defect / high-field passivation model and the empirical E_pit vs. log[Cl⁻] relation used in real corrosion engineering, with live readouts for passive current density, pitting potential, active pit count and worst-case pit depth.