What is Corrosion Testing and Why Do You Need a Corrosion Test?

Corrosion is a process where your metal product reacts with moisture, air, or chemicals and leads to rust or damage over time. If you are a metal product manufacturer, you need to ensure that the corrosion resistance property is high so that your product can perform better and have a long lifespan. This guide is dedicated to telling you about what corrosion testing is and why you need a corrosion test. Let’s get started!

What is Corrosion?

Corrosion is a common chemical reaction that you may observe in metals around you. In this process, metals slowly get damaged by continuously reacting with water, air, or chemicals. This process causes rust to form. Corrosion is not good for metals because it destroys them from the inside and weakens them over time.

If you are a manufacturer of any metal product, ensure that corrosion does not affect your product. An example of rust could be an iron nail that you left outside in the rain. It slowly gets reddish brown. This is rust caused by water and oxygen.

What is Corrosion Testing?

Corrosion testing is a type of environmental testing method. It checks how well a material can resist rust or damage when exposed to moisture, air, salt, or chemicals. This evaluation method is essential for manufacturers, as it helps them to understand the corrosion resistance properties of the product. If the corrosion resistance is high, that shows the products have great power to withstand adverse conditions like rain, water, etc.

Products with low corrosion resistance are more susceptible to corrosion and rust. Many products made of metal have to undergo this corrosion test. Some examples of these products are automotive parts, fasteners, coated metals, electroplating, appliances, plumbing, marine equipment, and building materials. With the help of a corrosion testing laboratory, you can ensure safety, durability and improved product performance.

Why Do You Need a Corrosion Test?

Corrosion testing is essential for metal products to determine how long they can last without being damaged by rust or chemical reactions. From HVAC testing and refrigerators testing to battery testing. Testing services is essential in industries to maintain the quality and credibility of the product.

When your product is exposed to air, water or chemicals, it can gradually lose its original shape and begin to deform and deteriorate. This can lead to product failure, safety risks, and higher repair costs. That's why meeting with the best testing laboratory means you can choose better materials, improve coatings, and create stronger products for your customers. Even corrosion testing must conform to local and global standards set by leading authorities.

Corrosion Test Methods

Corrosion test methods come in many types and purposes because different materials and environments cause rust in different ways. Each type of corrosion testing provides specific conditions for a product and checks how well your product is performing and holds resistance to collision. Below, we have mentioned the 4 main types of corrosion testing methods you must know about:

Salt Spray Testing

Salt spray testing is a corrosion test that is necessary to check overall corrosion resistance properties. With the help of this procedure, you can know how much metals or coating resist corrosion. This process is required for various products. For example, salt spray testing is used for automotive parts, fasteners, tools, and electrical equipment. Even common items like batteries, ACs, and refrigerators can also go through this test to check their resistance to rust.

When you contact a environmental testing laboratory. They place your product in a salt spray chamber filled with salty mist. They use equipment such as salt spray chambers, air compressors, and salt solution tanks. With the help of these, they perform salt spray testing with precision and provide accurate and fast results to their customers.

Copper Strip Corrosion Test

Copper strip corrosion testing is another type of corrosion testing. With this method, you can check whether petroleum products such as fuels or lubricants cause corrosion in copper parts. This is also an important step in mechanical testing, where the copper strip is placed in a liquid at a certain temperature. After a few hours, it is checked for stains.

The main equipment used for this test is: a test bath, copper strips, a beaker and a thermometer. Engine manufacturers often use this method to ensure that the fuel and oil work perfectly with the engine. This reduces the demand for copper parts and maintains the quality and reliability of the product.

Corrosion Coupon Testing

Corrosion coupon testing is an advanced testing method that involves placing your metal sample in the appropriate environment. A team of experts performs this task and sets a time limit, and after that time, the samples are removed, cleaned, and weighed to measure the metal loss.

This corrosion test is used for pipelines, tanks, cooling systems and marine equipment. The team uses equipment such as corrosion coupons and cleaning equipment. And they scale for accurate corrosion rate measurements.

Electrochemical Corrosion Testing

Electrochemical corrosion testing method is used to test how metals react to electrical currents in a corrosive environment. Manufacturers use this method to protect their equipment, like batteries, pipelines, medical implants, and marine equipment.

This helps them maintain the safety and quality of their product and protect their improvements from electrical currents. Experts use a metal sample in a solution, and a certain amount of voltage is applied to measure the corrosion rate of the sample. They use devices such as a potentiostat, a reference electrode, and an electrochemical cell.

Summary

Corrosion testing is important in industries to ensure the safety of products under harsh conditions. Many industries, such as automotive, construction, marine, and oil and gas, rely on this testing to ensure products are of high quality and perform as expected, even under harsh environmental conditions. When introducing your products to the market, you must ensure that your product passes the series of tests involved in corrosion testing. This will enable you to improve your products and mass-produce them without any problems.