Rust Prevention by Electric Potential Difference.

[recnepswillia]

I hope I'm posting this in the right spot, but I've been wondering this for a while now and figured this would be the best place to ask...

I know that rust is an process involving electricity and rust forms on the negatively charged anode right?

If that's the case, since a car is on rubber tires and is not grounded to the earth, would rust slow down if when the car is parked, it were grounded to the Earth so it was at it's lowest electric potential?

(i'm going to school for mechanical engineering and probably won't do much more with electricity that what I've learned this year (which isn't much))

If anyone could shed some light on whether or not this would work it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[K^2]

No, grounding the car would speed up the process, if anything. You can use electric potentials to prevent rust, but it's a little more complicated than that. The easiest way is by setting up a sacrificial anode, and making it out of material that naturally establishes the correct potential. It's a little difficult to do with the car, though.

 

[Danger]

Rust will happen to untreated iron/steel whether or not there is electricity involved. It's just very slow burning. It happens to aluminum so rapidly that it's almost impossible to avoid. In the latter case, it's considered to be a good thing, since the first layer inhibits any further corrosion.
Back when I belonged to the EAA, wherein people built their own aeroplanes, it was widely known that monel rivets had to be used when joining steel to aluminum, to avoid dialectric corrosion of the parts around the joints.