Extreme wear protection up to 1,050°C

Citation

(2006), "Extreme wear protection up to 1,050°C", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 78 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2006.12778bad.014

Extreme wear protection up to 1,050°C

Materials

Extreme wear protection up to 1,050°C

Keywords: Coatings technology, Metals

Nitron CA, a new hard coating from Tecvac Limited of Cambridge, is reported to give high wear resistance in extreme engineering applications with a hardness of 3,000 HV, which is fully maintained at temperatures of up to 1,050°C in cutting, milling, punching and diecasting, and other specialist forming processes for both ferrous and non-ferrous metals.

“Nitron CA, based on Tecvac's crayon system, gives everyone in high speed or high temperature metal shaping a whole new set of options,” explained Tecvac operations director John Rushforth. Our research team has perfected a hard coating, with three times the hardness of hard chrome, that normally operates at 750°C, but can be pushed if required to forming operations involving temperatures above 1,000°C.”

The new Nitron CA coating is applied using Tecvac's electron beam PVD technology. It claims exceptional oxidation resistance at temperatures between 500 and 1,000°C. This, in turn, allows cutting or forming tools, themselves formed from costly high performance alloys, to have extended effective operational life, sometimes by a factor of four, compared with uncoated tools.

“This new coating was designed for extreme applications,” commented Peter Carpenter, a Director of Tecvac and its parent company Wallwork Heat treatment Ltd. “We already have a comprehensive range of hard coatings, but Nitron CA gives a 15 per cent gain in hardness and a 36 per cent gain in maximum operating temperature compared with our TiAlN (Titanium Aluminium Nitride) coating, already a leader in this field.”

The new coating has a distinctive silver-blue appearance. While this is attractive in itself, its real advantage is that it also serves as a wear indicator, enabling visual inspection of the tool to highlight wear patterns, so that recoating or replacement can be made to avoid the risks of unplanned downtime, a critical factor in many high speed hot working operations.

Nitron CA coating processes are carried out in a high quality standard production environment that conforms to ISO 9000 Series Standards and aerospace accreditations AS 9100 and NADCAP.

Details available from: Tecvac Limited. Tel: +44 (0)1954 233700; Fax: +44 (0)1954 233733; E-mail: sales@tecvac.com; web site: www.tecvac.com