What word could this be:
"Carboxylates protecting by interacting with corrosion sites and
[mealing][kneeling] the surface and actually passivating the surface.

Is he talking about making it mealy so something will stick to it?

the carboxylic acids would bind to the iron surface, impeding the
other ions (chloride, hydroxide etc ) from attacking the surface. It
is hard to determine the exact words mentioned in your question
without a little more context. Does it matter what the exact word is?

This might be it. Not technically the word to use, however. Are you
dealing with a written document, or a recording? Can you put it up on
the web somehwere?

Annealing-
http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=annealing

Thanks everyone!  Yes, it does need to be the exact word as it is for
a deposition transcript, and (as frequently happens)  the audio is
unintelligible at that spot.  As  court reporter, I should have
stopped him and asked him, but we were clipping along, and I thought I
could easily find it later.

I believe your best choice is "annealing."

"In metallurgy and materials science annealing is a heat treatment
wherein the microstructure of a material is altered, causing changes
in its properties such as strength and hardness. Typically, this
results in softening of the metal through removal of crystal defects
and the internal stresses which they cause. In the semiconductor
industry, silicon wafers are annealed, so that dopant atoms (usually,
boron, phosphorus, or arsenic) can be incorporated into substitutional
positions in the crystal lattice, resulting in drastic changes in the
electrical properties of the semiconducting material."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing