New approach for internal corrosion/erosion testing of automotive radiators

摘要

Testing radiators for internal corrosion has became an important issue for car manufacturers since they look for a durability target of 10 years. Only few attempts have been made to correlate bench test and field results. Fortunately, experience with automotive passenger car aluminum radiators has been favorable; at least no catastrophic failures have been reported. Some authors claim that is not feasible to have an accelerated test that causes leaks in a short period of time that can be realistically correlated with field service experiences (1). Car and heat exchangers manufacturers use internal specifications to provide some ideas about the internal corrosion resistance of the radiators, but there is not reel field data to correlate with. The aim of this paper is to present a new approach for internal corrosion test that correlates with field data and take in account several parameters involved on the internal corrosion/erosion of car radiators.