Surface treatment to improve corrosion resistance of Al plate heat exchangers

The correlations between thermal and physical properties were studied through thermal conductivity measurements, hardness tests, salt spray tests (AASS) among the surface treatment samples named K20, K40 with thickness of 20, 40 μm respectively and raw sample named K00. In thermal conductivity measurements, there are little differences among the samples as K00, K20 and K40, they exhibit 153.39, 150.69 and 149.76 W/(m·K), respectively. According to hardness tests, K00, K20 and K40 exhibit 87.9, 259.7 and 344.8 in Vickers values. In the result of salt spray tests to examine the effects on corrosion resistance, K00, K20 and K40 exhibit the grade of 3–5, 2.0–9.8 and 10, respectively. The mutual relation of the above results was analyzed. It is found that the surface treatments do not affect the thermal conductivity of aluminum and result in the improvement of physical properties. As a result of the technology, the surface improvement of aluminum alloy specimen is achieved without thermal degradation. It validates the ability of the aluminum plate heat exchangers with surface treatment to enhance the corrosion resistance. Present work is performed as the first fundamental threshold in the process of aluminum plate heat exchangers development to check out its possibility, therefore the next step-experimental and numerical study of practical aluminum plate heat exchangers will be made.