Krown Rust Protection has joined forces with engineering researchers at the University of Windsor to develop a Corrosion Index, a consumer-oriented metric they hope will become a standard measurement for communicating the amount of rust on vehicles.
The university research team photographed a little over a third of the visible surfaces of 228 Krown-protected vehicles that were collected through the course of two sampling campaigns. The results were compared to measurements taken from 141 unprotected vehicles that were collected in a similar fashion. Both protected and unprotected vehicles that were studied varied in make, model and age.
By examining these photographs with special imaging software, the scientists were able to measure the amount of visible rust to determine what percentage of the surface area in square centimetres was corroded and then recorded that number to establish each vehicle’s Corrosion Index (CI).
Researcher Dr. Susan Sawyer-Beaulieu and Dr. Edwin Tam, Project Supervisor, and their research team compared the CI measurements for all of the sampled vehicles and concluded that unprotected cars had 6.8 times more visible corrosion on body panels than cars with protected body panels. For underbody parts that are subjected to greater exposure of dirt, gravel, water spray and road chemicals, unprotected cars had 3.6 times more corrosion than those that were protected.
"The real story lies not in the ratio of corrosion on unprotected body panels versus protected body panels,” said researcher Dr. Sawyer-Beaulieu, “but in a comparison of the exponential spread of the actual size of the corroded surface areas over the years.”