Earthing to prevent corrosion

[Nordic]

To prevent corrosion in watercooled systems one should add something like Redline's Water Wetter which also increases the waters cooling abilities. This is especially important in systems where you have different metals in your cooling system. Like a copper block, aluminium reservoir and brass fittings.

The reason electrolysis happens is because the bindings of oxides are stronger with certain metals (alu) and weaker with others (copper).

It occured to me that earthing the components of the cooling system to a common ground could prevent electrolysis from happening. Is this a correct assumption?

Or would it just make it easier for the electrolysis to happen as the electrons can now more easily travel through the common ground?

Any chemists around that could clarify this?

[p[ara]d0x]

Well, you seem to have answered yourself, 42, or course :) j/k I don't really know the answer to this one, but what you're suggesting does make sense. It couldn't hurt to try anyways.

[Joe]

McMaster sells corrosion bars for that reason.

[Nordic]

Kind of like having anodes made of zinc on boat motors. That would be interesting. If you simply earth all of the metal components of the cooling system to the chassi and then attach a piece of zinc, you should end up with the anode beeing the piece of zinc and thereby preventing corrosion of the other metals as they are guarantueed to be purer metals than zinc.

Hmm.. I simply got to dig more into this! I want a really stable 24/7 unattended watercooling system that I won't have any fears about leaving on for a year.

[jimsnyder]

It is not so much the purity of the metals, but the oxidation/reduction potential of the metal itself. Zinc is more easily oxidized than most other metals, so you find zinc-coated chain link fences, etc. Zinc becomes the "sacrificial metal" for oxidation, preventing oxidation of the coated metal until the zinc is mostly oxidized. (Chemist!)