Hey kickback thanks a lot for sharing your experience on that... let me ask you have you tried passivation? like puting the electrodes in very concentrated nitric acid for 1 hour maybe?
this is said to be part of the passivation cycle...
i found a source of infrmation on finishing of stainless stell according to the application but is in portughese..
http://www.nucleoinox.org.br/upfiles/arquivos/downloads/Manual_acabamento_a%E7o%20inox.pdfhere it descrbes the procedure to transform hexavalent ions that are byproducts of electrolysis to safe product neutralized.
it tells alot about all the types of corrosion and how to prevent.. .
i´m not sure if we are going to punture the passivation when its done correctly... i mean with voltages.. if the water is pure enough it should not be corrosive at all...
stainless steel is pretty much like a many metal composition when its not protected by the oxide layer the metals come out of it and it is as good as iron... exagerating from what i read if you allow the corrosion to go it can go all the way thru the plate creating holes..
also found that polished surfaces will have smaller area than unpolished. so less chemical interaction on the surface could be expected..
thats maybe why you get now more gas since the area of the electrodes increase with corrosion.. than when they were new..
i was thinking also about the polished electrodes because if i wantd to insert a pulsed laser i would make it go tangetial to the rod such it would need to round the cell tousands of times before exiting the cavity depending on the angle of incidence and absorption...
