Stone impact damage to automotive paint finishes: An introduction to impact physics and impact induced corrosion

Stone impact damage to automotive paint finishes has drawn significant attention from both automobile manufacturers and their OEM paint suppliers. Impact damage is a transient and complex phenomenon, a function of a number of variables such as velocity, angle, temperature and material constants for both projectile and the target system. This work presents a critical review of earlier work and describes an impact physics perspective to the stone chip problem. This work also illustrates the application of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) to detect and estimate adhesion loss at the metal/paint interface brought about by impact stresses. Two simple procedures to estimate impact induced corrosion (IIC) from Bode plots are also described.