Thermal sprayed coatings of carbide materials are a proven means for wear and erosion protection. Our comprehensive carbide portfolio includes the right material to match your specific wear needs and operating environment.
Flexible application choices
Depending on the specific material chosen, carbide materials are generally best applied using High Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF) spray. When necessary, acceptable carbide coatings can be achieved using atmospheric plasma spray or combustion powder Thermospray.
Surface protection your specific wear needs
Thermal-sprayed carbide coatings are often the best choice to protect against:
| Abrasion |
| Adhesion |
| Erosion (solid particle or cavitation) |
| Fretting |
| Impact |
| Galling |
| Sliding wear |
| Hard surfaces |
| Complex combined wear mechanisms |
Materials specialized for your service environment
Tungsten carbide materials in a cobalt matrix offer the best wear protection. For service that requires better corrosion resistance, we recommend a matrix of nickel, cobalt-chromium, or cobalt-chromium-nickel. If your application requires service temperatures above 500 °C (930 °F), we recommend chromium carbide materials, generally with varying amounts of nickel-chromium matrix. Materials with a higher percentage of matrix produce coatings with better ductility, resulting in improved impact and fretting resistance. Conversely, a lower percentage of matrix offers greater hardness, resulting in better abrasion and wear resistance.
Material optimization through manufacturing
The manufacturing processes we use to produce our materials directly affect their service and spray properties. Agglomerated and sintered carbides produce surfaces with better microhardness and coating deposition efficiency compared to fused and crushed carbides. We achieve even higher deposition efficiencies through further powder densification. Through our manufacturing processes, we optimize our carbide materials for various applications and spray processes. We supply many of our product chemistries in different powder sizes to suit specific liquid fuel or gas fuel HVOF spray guns. The right combination of all these optimization procedures ultimately saves you time and money on your production and enhances surface service life.
An alternative to hard chromium plating
Thermal spray carbides are an excellent alternative to hard chromium plating, particularly for landing gears, hydraulic rods, and oil field equipment. The benefits include:
| Faster application, reducing the time component is out of service |
| Better tailoring of material to the operating environment |
| Coatings can be ground and / or superfinished to very high surface finishes and tight tolerances |
| Smooth “as-sprayed” surfaces that are often usable without further machining |
Fine carbides for non-machinable components
For components that are difficult or too costly to machine, we offer very fine carbide materials. They provide very smooth “as-sprayed” surface finishes that require little or no machining. For example, corrugating rolls used in the paper industry need an abrasion resistant surface, but have a geometry that would be cost-prohibitive to machine.
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