As the largest subcategory within the paint industry, wear-resistant coatings are a lucrative business, providing vital equipment and services to the military, automobile manufacturers, and the oil industry.
For instance, as of 2014, wear coatings for marine use were worth an estimated $400 million on their own. That same year, the automotive industrial coatings market was worth $2 billion, making it the largest market for coatings in the world.
Across all industries, two most commonly used industrial coatings are chrome and thermal.
Pick Your Poison: the Drawbacks of Chrome and Thermal Coatings
Chrome is cheap and easy to install, but is less durable than other methods.
On the other hand, thermal spray coatings can provide a strong, dense molten layer to industrial equipment. However, the disadvantages to this method can inhibit the quality of the coating at the end of deposition.
Thermal spray industrial coatings are effective when done correctly, but the uniformity of the coating is often compromised due to a lengthy application process. In the effort to make each surface coating as uniform as possible in thickness, very small areas of the object are spray coated at once, as working around curves and edges of a product poses issues. The machines used to perform this task need to be customized — another long process — meaning that it could take a full day to coat just one product using a thermal spray.
For years, companies have had to choose between unreliable chrome coatings or time-consuming and expensive thermal sprays.
The amount of time spent applying these coatings and programming equipment on a case-by-case basis can cost a company serious amounts of money. While large, simple or flat surfaces can be coated more easily and in less time, products with more advanced geometries are difficult to accommodate. They often require an additional step through another machine to achieve the necessary dimensions.
Is There a Solution?
A revolutionary method of coating has been developed to replace both hard chrome and thermal spray coatings using vacuum coating equipment. Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition as well as physical vapor depositions are used by Duralar’s new coating equipment. The coatings are emitted from sheet material in the form of gas for an even coating. They are also customizable to produce thick or thin coatings depending on the application.
Duralar is the innovator behind this new method and uses the strongest material on earth, diamond, combined with metal to produce exceptionally hard coatings with water and erosion-resistant qualities. Contact Duralar to learn more about the new technology that’s disrupting the industrial and abrasion resistant coatings market.
