Reliability corrosion test development for air conditioning condenser

摘要

To improve product robustness, a global reliability approach based on corrosion behaviour is developed on exchangers. This publication focuses on aluminum exchangers from car front face such as condensers. Due to its position, the condenser is submitted to environmental pollutants, various temperature and humidity conditions depending on geographical working locations; all these combinations generating corrosion cases. In order to develop this approach, car mission profile, pollutants at the exchanger surface and pollutants coming from the environment have been studied. Among those factors, impact of pH in solution, Chloride and Carbon pollutant amount, cyclic test in temperature and humidity were deeply investigated. This publication is dealing with the correlation between the corrosion degradation modes observed in the field and after different tests conditions. As a conclusion, a corrosion reliability test able to determine condenser lifetime in the field is proposed inside SAE committee as SAE J3179.