Supersonic Deposition of Nanostructured Coatings

Official information can be found here

Follow the Supersonic Project in Progress

The basic scientific and technological concept of the project is to use agglomerated nanophased powders to be transferred onto a substrate in the form a coating with very little or none change of crystal structure. This will allow to obtain nano-structured coatings with a crystal size very close to the powder one.

Falex Tribology is contributing to the Supersonic project with testing of the coatings’ tribological properties to demonstrate in 3 potential industrial applications:

• Aeronautical
  Improved fretting wear resistance coatings with low friction operating in harsh conditions
• Biomedical
  Ti-based nanostructured thick coatings with improved performance with respect to osteointegration and wear resistance
• Mechanical
  Abrasion and fretting wear resistant coatings exhibiting increased lifetime. Thermal shock resistance can widen their usage

As an industrial user, it is important that the coating can be post processed in an efficient way. This means finishing operations must be possible at acceptable cost and high throughput. For this reason Falex together with KUL investigated various finishing operations for obtaining reasonable polished/smooth surfaces.

To get information about the useability of coatings in industry, laboratory scale wear tests of different coatings (different batches) are done with sufficient repeats to determine reliability of the coating process. A 50 station wear test machine is the only cost efficient solution for the required testing need. Test runs of 10.000 cycles – 100.000 cycles – 100.000 cycles are performed in parallel on 50 test samples. Profilometric wear measurement can be done efficiently on the tested parts: 50 excel sheets/series. Measurement of wear damage on the counterface can be done by OM : 50 micrographs/series.