• Applications
  • Wear Resistant Coatings
  • Medical Device Coatings
  • Food Processing Equipment Coatings, FDA Approved
  • Coatings for Carbon Fiber Composites
  • Hard Chrome Replacement
  • Corrosion Protection
  • Dielectric Coatings
  • Electrically Conductive
  • Thermal Barrier
  • EMI/RFI Shielding
• Complete Components
• Thermal Spray Processes
  • Plasma Spray
  • HVOF
  • Flame Spray
  • Electric Arc Spray
  • Cold Spray
• Post-Spray Capabilities
• Industries
• Materials
• Problem Solving & Development
• Quality
• Environment
• Associations
• Company News

Problem Solving & Development

Thermal Spray Technologies, Inc. is unique in its ability to work with it's customers to provide them with a custom engineered solution for their specific surface engineering requirements. When a customer describes their components desired surface properties TST uses its extensive materials engineering expertise to assure the optimum coating is designed to meet or exceed the components specific needs. After a coating solution is developed TST's uses its production engineering expertise to produce the coating in typically medium and high volume. This is accomplished with TST's thorough understanding of the thermal spray processes and the many methods to automate them.

Coating Design and Development

Thermal Spray Technologies' materials engineering staff has over 60 years of industrial thermal spray coating design and development experience. When a customer contacts our engineering staff with a potential coating application TST uses its expertise to first understand the environment the coating will be used in, and then design the properties required to withstand the environment. In order to achieve the optimum coating properties for each specific application TST involves the customer in the coating development and testing phases. The customer is educated about the coating materials that TST is recommending and is educated on how the component's design can be used to get the most out the coating properties. Combining a well engineered coating material and component design results in the component functioning in the optimum manner.

Development to Production Example

A manufacturer of food dispensing equipment approached TST regarding a shaft that rotated in contact with a polymer seal that kept liquid from leaking from the dispensing unit. The liquid contained a high concentration of sugar and when the device was not maintained properly dried sugar would embed in the polymer seal. The sugar was very abrasive and would wear a groove in the shaft which led to leaking. The customer tried many different ideas to solve this problem including using expensive shaft materials so the shaft could be hardened by heat treating. The heat treated shaft was also combined with hard chrome plating but none of these designs prevented the groove formation.

TST worked with the customer to first design a coating that was significantly harder than the sugar. The customer performed extensive testing with the TST designed coating and a wear groove was never developed in testing. After the proper coating was designed to solve the wear problem TST worked with the customer to redesign the shaft. Since the coating now provided the components required wear resistance the part no longer need to be made from an expensive heat treated alloy. A softer, easier to machine alloy was selected and combined with the newly developed coating. The final design of the component resulted in providing a less expensive part that then provided all on the properties desired. This component has been in production for several years with no reported problems.

Ceramic coated rod for wear resistance