With the main target of improving fuel consumption, one of the biggest challenges on harness wiring industries is to reduce weight of the assembled harness. Based on that, research on alternatives to copper wires started with the replacement of copper by aluminum cores which are more cost effective and around 48% weight reduction. This reduction is particularly important as improving fuel consumption will reduce carbon dioxide emissions. However, replacing copper by aluminum is far from an easy process, especially when connecting the aluminum wires with terminals which are mainly composed by copper alloys and when submitted to wet salted environments a galvanic corrosion process starts and all aluminum from the core disappears.

The method to avoid corrosion is protecting the connection from external environments and based on this considerations we developed a process to minimize galvanic corrosion. After the connections are made between aluminum wire and the terminal a polymer solution is applied over the connection to make the protection. The protection material is still being developed as it needs to be a fast and effective process.