New generation of coatings can reduce wear rate by as much as 85 percent

Carbodeon has worked with metal finishing specialist CCT to develop a new NanoDiamond enhanced electroless nickel plating with significantly improved performance in sliding applications. Electroless nickel coatings offer many advantages over other coating types, such as excellent corrosion and abrasion resistance, creating an even coating thickness over complex geometries and at relatively low cost. A limitation to their performance has been that they don’t perform well in tribological applications involving moving metal parts, where adhesive wear and galling tend to lead to rapid wear or failure. Incorporating NanoDiamond into the coating solves this problem. Spherical diamond nanoparticles are specially treated to make them disperse in coating liquids and carry a positive electrical charge on their surfaces. In the plating process, the diamond particles behave similarly to positively charged metal ions and together with the coating material they co-deposit onto the component. Metal-diamond composite surface treatments have already shown their value in abrasion resistant coatings, but in this latest generation of coatings the process has been optimised to better combat adhesive wear, which occurs mainly when the plated parts are in sliding contact with other metal parts.