  We study a model of corrosion and passivation of a metalic surface in contact
with a solution using scaling arguments and simulation. The passive layer is
porous so that the metal surface is in contact with the solution. The volume
excess of the products may suppress the access of the solution to the metal
surface, but it is then restored by a diffusion mechanism. A metalic site in
contact with the solution or with the porous layer can be passivated with rate
p and volume excess diffuses with rate D. At small times, the corrosion front
linearly grows in time, but the growth velocity shows a t^{-1/2} decrease after
a crossover time of order t_c ~ D/p^2, where the average front height is of
order h_c ~ D/p. A universal scaling relation between h/h_c and t/t_c is
proposed and confirmed by simulation for 0.00005 <= p <= 0.5 in square
lattices. The roughness of the corrosion front shows a crossover from
Kardar-Parisi-Zhang scaling to Laplacian growth (diffusion-limited erosion -
DLE) at t_c. The amplitudes of roughness scaling are obtained by the same kind
of arguments as previously applied to other competitive growth models. The
simulation results confirm their validity. Since the proposed model captures
the essential ingredients of different corrosion processes, we also expect
these universal features to appear in real systems.
