Accelerated Corrosion Testing of Automotive Evaporators and Condensers

There is an ongoing effort in the industry to develop an accelerated corrosion test for automotive heat exchangers. This has become even more important as automakers are focusing on corrosion durability of 15 years in the field versus current target of 10 years. To this end an acid immersion test was developed and reported in a previous paper for condensers (1). This paper extends those results to evaporators and establishes the efficacy of the test using these results and those reported in the literature. The paper also discusses variability in corrosion test results as observed in tests such as ASTM G85:A3 Acidified Synthetic Sea Water Test (SWAAT), and its relation to field durability.