Coolant System Voltage
 

Hi ALL, I have become aware that there could be a NEED to teach LS-1 Tech readers about the requirement to MEASURE coolant voltage.

The chance that the coolant could have a higher voltage than "0", .1 volts AL/ .5 volts for FE is possible.

This voltage can cause current flow that will destroy the radiator, block, head, cylinder walls, water pump, etc.

I will state methods of repair/measurement if some are interested ?

Lance

Would this be a form of "stray voltage"?

No need to over think it, as it happens in these swaps. Just run a sacrificial anode radiator cap. Some say it's grounds, some say it's the specific type of coolant.

Generally, it takes out the radiator/heater core first, which, can be expensive if you have a nice radiator, so like I said, $18 cap is what I run.

I mean, even GM has this issue, so I have a hard time believing there is a real good solution.

Block Zink
 

Hi YES, a "stray" voltage that could cause current flow.

I have fit a block drain with a Zinc rod, the Anode.

I sell this for $20.00 to your door. (USA)

This fitment causes current to "flow" into the Zinc as this is the best path for the electrons.
There are many causes of "stray" voltage.
GM tests for this though for a "swap" one SHOULD measure Coolant Voltage.
The "air bag" suspension is one common cause.
Another cause is too small a ground strap that does NOT pass cranking current.
The GM OEM's have fought this problem though I would ALWAYS test to be sure they have cured the voltage reading.
The Corvette body material, glass not steel, has a great effect on voltage in the cooling system.
Lance

This is easily checked with a DVOM and the car's battery. The pitting and rotting happens mostly when there's 2 different metals, iron block, aluminum heads aluminum manifold with water passages for some reason. Coolant condition, age and voltage accumulation is mostly happening to neglected, poorly maintained vehicles, diesels (Ford) need to be checked for this. Some say this is caused by circulation.

This is one indication of grounding thru the coolant... check the engine grounds (do voltage drop test).

Coolant Voltage of "0" = Engine Life
 

Hi 64, yes good tech, thanks.

I can add that a different water MIX/NO WATER can reduce Coolant Voltage.

I can add that a Coolant treatment like Hyper Lube treatment reduces/stops current flow in the coolant.

MOST here spend a VAST amount of MONEY to make their engine stronger/live longer forgetting the LOW COST items simple to install.

The GOOD tech posted by RPTurbo, the Radiator Cap method is a simple solution !

THUS I BEG LS-1 tech members to "post" their Coolant System Voltage REPORTS ?

Lance

I have seen mixed metal piping systems take our million dollar water cooled elec drive systems due to stray current. Simple copper and stainless pipes. Sounds like the exact same thing you are all describing below.

Put distilled water in,

with enough coolant for the climate conditions.

/done forgotten

NOPE. There are enough elements in coolant to become a form of electrolyte after inhibitors dissipate. Do you know when that is? Neither do I.

theres enough elements in the metal cooling system to become electrolyte also. that doesn't mean you wouldn't start with the minimum number of said charged particles to begin with by making good decision. Here in Florida I don't even run coolant, the tracks don't even allow it. I also throw away my $69 radiator every couple years for the hell of it. Previous owners of these ancient truck motors seem like they ran tap water for 150k so its all ugly orange by the time I get it anyways.

.....which pretty much negates the "/done forgotten " element of the previous post.

well nothing is done forgotten

only forgotten for the time being so you can focus on other stuff.

Assign a number of years to each component, it looks like this:

valve springs: 150,000 miles
Timing chain: 90,000-120,000 miles
differential carrier: 200,000 miles
water pump: 42,000-55,000 miles
ball joints: 64,000-76,000 miles
Wheel bearings: 150,000-240,000 miles
Balancer: 75,000-150,000 iles
Coolant liquids: 20,000-120,000 miles
engine oil: yeah right, I'm going to put a number here
camshaft: infinite/500,000 miles
driveshaft: infinite/500k
radiator: 60,000-137k
Engine rear/front main: 47,000-150k
Use your imagination: X00,000 miles

anything over 500k we can consider infinite because unless you are in the 0.001% or similar small percentage of population, you will either sell it or lose it/crash it before going that far with a specific part, and even if there was one, it is unlikely there will be many.

So now, pick a part. Ball joints. You've /done forgotten them. Just like you did/forgotten the water pump that you just changed. You don't change it and go, "oh no, Its only going to last 42k now I'm worried about it" you /done forgotten it till it weeps at 49,148.

In the case of cooling liquid, using tap water would work but the life expectancy of almost every component would be cut by a factor of 10. That is, we can give 10 times the life expectancy to the cooling system by starting it off with the right mix. There are factory blends that will achieve 100k to 150k. The system overall is considered open so water is leaving at some rate, eventually the volume in the system will decline and require maintenance regardless of whether the electrolytes are causing a disaster to form. Good discipline with visual inspection and taking note of any odd smells, flushing and exchanging the liquid distilled water frequently is the highest you can go with maintenance, but the purity of this system requires that every surface be extremely clean, the system as a whole would need to be "new". The factory blend that goes 150k started with a clean, shiny, new surface on every internal orifice. You couldn't say, put that same factory blend into a used engine and get the same result.

We used DI water in the drive coolant. Didn't help. You can take a bi-metal Nickel and copper rod to a severed frog leg and it will jump from induced current. The water is not the issue. The dissimilar metals is the issue.

I personally like to use distilled water with 25% propylene glycol and a surfactant as my cooling system mixture.

Engine Life = 25K Hours
 

Hi Jake, thanks.
MANY here RATE engine performance with a LOWER race time to STATE BETTER performance.
I DO THE OPPOSITE, my engine customers engine's (CSP in Texas) MUST LAST 25K hours of run time WITHOUT never stopping !

That would equate to ONE MILLION street miles of operation.

MY "tech" is a simple task, just measure the voltage.

Lance

Good ol' electrolysis rears its ugly head...

You are missing something. Lightning cannot conduct in distilled water. Nothing can. Its a property of the liquid's locked charge carriers. You must have metal ions in the system prior to filling it with clean water. Furthermore distilled is not truly ion free. If you have a large current (guessing say, 50,000 volts attempting to pass) you would want ultra pure, or nano pure water, a step up.

True -- but -- add distilled water to an iron/aluminum system, and in twenty minutes you have metallic ions in the water.

The failure in the drive cooling was galvanic corrosion at the copper/stainless interface. Had the whole system been done with stainless it wouldn't have been an issue. E pure water would make no difference. The water was not the conductor.

With respect to vehicle cooling systems;

First some background, what we are discussing is corrosion, and how the surface of the aluminum in particular can be fortified against corrosion, for example:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b79...9f0323c3bc.pdf
“Because of the high affinity of aluminum surfaces for oxygen, the metal is always covered with a highly resistant oxide film; the improvement of this natural oxide film
to produce an anodic oxide film which is attractively finished, has excellent corrosion resistance, and possesses other com- mercially desirable qualities is the aim of the
anodizing in- dustry today. “

http://www.corrosionpro.com/blog/the...n-of-aluminum/
“The result is that the oxide layer is only stable in a pH range of 7.0 to 9.0. Below 7 or above 9 the rate of corrosion increases at an increasing rate.”

Passivation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivation_(chemistry)
“Generally, there are two main ways to passivate aluminum alloys (not counting plating, painting, and other barrier coatings): chromate conversion coating and anodizing.”



Now, small science to check magnitude of our assumptions,
First what are very conductive salts of Aluminum?
https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstrac...RevE.71.031201
“We present experimental measurements of the specific electrical conductivity (σ) in aqueous solutions of aluminum salts at different temperatures, covering all salt concentrations from saturation to infinite dilution. The salts employed were AlCl3, AlBr3, AlI3, and Al(NO3)3, which present a 1:3 relationship between the electrical charges of anion and cation.”

“Electrical conductivity (σ) vs temperature for selected concentrations. Solid dots correspond to AlI3 (C=0.32), open dots to AlBr3 (C=4.73), solid squares to AlCl3 (C=9.67) and open squares to Al(NO3)3 (C=13.6). C is in units of eq mol per liter, i.e., the molarity divided by 3.”


so, google electrical conduction in water, you get:
“High quality deionized water has a conductivity of about 5.5 μS/m at 25 °C, typical drinking water in the range of 5–50 mS/m, while sea water about 5 S/m (or 50 mS/cm) (i.e., sea water's conductivity is one million times higher than that of deionized water).”


Sea water (extremely conductive) is showing us 50 mS/cm,
drinking water is .05mS/cm to .5mS/cm,
Our goal is to be below drinking water, so less than .05mS/cm

The most conductive dissolved salt of aluminum by mass is AlI2 (the least amount of moles/liter required in solution)

. AlI2 weighs 280.790479 ± 0.000061 g/mol
Assume a 3.5gallons = 13.24 liters cooling system

Image location for C vs temp:
https://journals.aps.org/pre/article...gures/4/medium


So now take a look at this graph, we are concerned with the far left side showing ‘less than drinking water conductance of 5-50mS/cm and less’.
https://journals.aps.org/pre/article...gures/2/medium

Math since we can’t use the resolution of the graph as it is, but can use a linear assumption to get tiny values as scientists.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/ls1tech...44662ac59f.jpg
*AlI3 is even heavier, oops, they look like 2's!!

So for starters, obviously nobody is dissolving 7grams of aluminum head into the cooling system everytime they fill it up with distilled water.

Next, the aluminum heads are not made of AlI2, that is, there is no salt of aluminum ready to dissolve there. In order to dissolve in water the aluminum would need a negative charge to dissolve with it, or loss of equivalent positive charge, to balance the charges. Obviously this is possible, but it stands out as additional steps to go through in order to create the dissolved Al: It doesn't happen immediately the way salt dissolves. Pure Al reacting with water turns to Al(OH)3 and 3H2(gas). It is possible to add Hydrogen to the Aluminum Oxide, turning it to Al3+ charged and water. I also think it is possible to involve O2. The PH of the liquid strongly influences which ions form.

Even if it was possible to dissolve enough Al, the molecular mass of Aluminum is 27g/mol which still means that 0.708grams of it would dissolve from the engine/head everytime you filled a 13Liter cooling system, just to get the water near the conductance of bottle drinking water. This does not magnitude check with common sense. It doesn't seem to be a valid concern in a vehicle cooling system with dissimilar metals, which is properly maintained.

More info you’ve probably seen (its just for content)
------
https://www.assda.asn.au/technical-i...etal-corrosion
"Contact between dissimilar metals occurs frequently but is often not a problem. The aluminium head on a cast iron block, the solder on a copper pipe, galvanising on a steel purlin and the steel fastener in an aluminium sheet are common examples.
What causes galvanic corrosion?
For galvanic or dissimilar or electrolytic corrosion to occur, three conditions must be met:
• The metal join must be wet with a conductive liquid
• There must be metal to metal contact
• The metals must have sufficiently different potentials "
------

A couple things stand out,
“All metals dissolve to some extent when they are wetted with a conductive liquid.”
Our best defense is to make sure the liquid going in is non conductive as possible. The cheapest water like this is distilled, but there are also nano-pure waters available.

” As a rule of thumb, if the potential difference is less than 0.1 volt, then it is unlikely that galvanic corrosion will be significant.”

We can prevent corrosion by putting in liquid with no conductance. And if anything happens to the liquid that causes it’s conductance to go up over time, we would replace it with fresh liquid to reset the conductance back down.


“When two metals are connected and in contact with a conducting liquid, the more active metal will corrode and protect the noble metal. Zinc is more negative than steel and so the zinc coating of galvanised steel will corrode to protect the steel at scratches or cut edges”

So this is interesting. It seems to imply the conductance of water will go up as the sacrificial metal dissolves over time. Not a problem in sea water where the liquid is starting out and always is as corrosive, but I don’t think at first glance that I would want a sacrificial anode in my cooling system, where it would act like a salt shaker.

Other interest:
”: Aluminum may be removed from water by means of ion exchange or coagulation/ flocculation. “

"Aluminum oxide may be present in water both in alkalic form (2Al2O3 (s) + 6H+ (aq) -> Al3+ (aq) + 3H2O (l)) and in acidic form (2Al2O3 (s) + 2OH- (aq) -> AlO2- (aq) + H2O (l)).
An example of a water soluble aluminum compound is aluminum sulphate with a water solubility of 370 g/L. "
Read more: https://www.lenntech.com/periodic/wa...#ixzz5C7C8uqpa

Ok. Now let's step back to every day life. You will not get virgin metal out of the shop and into a car in a perfect sanitary environment and get E pure water in it. Just to add stuff anyway for colligative properties and surface tension anyway and not pick up ionization. Especially when you start talking an engine that has already been filled once. You'll never get all the old fluid out.

Then, back to the pH side, your ethylene glycols end up turning acidic, which gets right into the area of dissolving metallic oxides, and your other additives include, among other things, aluminum flakes. And also - this was a mixed metal, not aluminum only, and iron dissolves MUCH more readily even at standard pH.

The zinc ingot will work well. I have seen creative use of zinc ingots protect iron uncoated in corrosive environments just be being sacrificial electrons.

And again, back to pH -- run water with propylene glycol, which won't go acidic, enough to get the boiling temps and freezing temps covered, a surfactant to improve heat transfer, and let her rip. Its the best way to handle it.