Salt Spray Testing Service

‘Bringing New Ideas To The Surface’

PreTreat’s Salt Spray Testing service is one of its most popular as it can provide a valuable assessment to the majority of manufacturers producing metal parts requiring a finished coating.

The salt spray test is an accelerated corrosion test that produces a corrosive attack on the coated samples in order to predict its suitability for use as a protective finish.

It’s a low-cost service, only charging per hour of testing duration.

Ensuring Corrosion Resistance

Coatings provide corrosion resistance to metallic parts made of steel, mazak or brass. Since coatings can provide a high corrosion resistance through the intended life of the part in use, it is necessary to check corrosion resistance by other means.

The salt spray test is an accelerated corrosion test that produces a corrosive attack on the coated samples in order to predict its suitability for use as a protective finish. The appearance of corrosion products (oxides) is evaluated after a period of time.

Test duration depends on the corrosion resistance of the coating; the more corrosion-resistant the coating is, the longer the period of testing without showing signs of corrosion.

Our Salt Spray Testing provides rapid results to help you check and improve your coatings’ corrosion resistance.

Testing Your Coatings Performance

Our Salt Spray Testing Service is popular because it is low-cost, quick, well standardized and reasonably repeatable.

There is, however, only a weak correlation between the duration of the salt spray test and the expected life of a coating, since corrosion is a very complicated process and can be influenced by many external factors.

Nevertheless, salt spray testing is widely used in the industrial sector for the evaluation of corrosion resistance of finished surfaces or parts.

The images to the left show examples of our salt spray testing performed for our clients to assess the performance of their coatings and systems.

Substrates & Coatings That Can Be Evaluated

  • Phosphated surfaces (with subsequent paint/primer/lacquer/rust preventive)
  • Zinc and zinc-alloy plating (see also electroplating). See ISO 4042 for guidance
  • Electroplated chromium, nickel, copper, tin
  • Coatings not applied electrolytically, such as zinc flake according to ISO 10683
  • Organic coatings
  • Painted surfaces with an underlying hot-dip galvanized coating can be tested according to this method. See ISO 12944-6

And those that can’t…

  • Hot-dip galvanized surfaces are not generally tested in a salt spray test (see ISO 1461 or ISO 10684). Hot-dip galvanizing produces zinc carbonates when exposed to a natural environment, protecting the coating metal & reducing the corrosion rate
  • The zinc carbonates are not produced when a hot-dip galvanized specimen is exposed to a salt spray fog, therefore this testing method does not give an accurate measurement of corrosion protection. ISO 9223 gives the guidelines for proper measurement of corrosion resistance for hot-dip galvanized specimens.