Research on simulation testing of humidity-controlled salt spray corrosion environment for electrical products under working conditions

Abstract Traditional neutral salt spray tests fail to accurately simulate the accelerated corrosion that occurs under actual energized conditions. We have developed a salt spray test chamber capable of reducing the relative humidity (RH) in the testing environment to prevent short circuits, insulation failures, and other faults that lead to premature damage during testing. Initially, the effect of salt spray concentration on corrosion at 85 % RH was examined, and it was found that the corrosion rate does not increase when the concentration surpasses 50 mg/m 3 . The humidity-controllable salt spray test demonstrated a closer match to real environmental corrosion, judging by both the appearance of corrosion and the acceleration ratios across different metals, where the acceleration ratio difference between maximum and minimum values was reduced from 18.6 times to 1.4 times. The influence of RH on the corrosion rate was revealed, with the highest rate observed at 75 % RH. Lastly, we proposed optimal parameters for energized salt spray tests, evaluated the failure modes of several products under these tests, preliminarily confirmed the consistency and acceleration effects of this method for electrical products in real marine atmospheric conditions.