New facility to serve the Chemical Processing market with a new, unique, hard, wear resistant coating.

Phil Black - PII Editor 13/05/2009

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A brand new manufacturing and development facility has been set up in the UK, which offers customers a rapid coating service for the application of an innovative carbon coating to a wide range of engineered components used in extreme, arduous environments.

After securing investment funding in November 2008, Diamond Hard Surfaces Ltd has opened a new facility at Caswell Science & Technology Park in Towcester, Northamptonshire.

The company has patented the technology to produce it’s Adamant™ coating which is a thick, hard, amorphous, 99% sp3 (diamond) coating that possesses a unique combination of surface properties. The coating is as smooth and slick as PTFE, but with excellent hardness (3,500-4,000HV) and the toughness of carbon-fibre. These unique properties provide the coating with technical advantages over other materials currently available, particularly in extreme, harsh operating environments, where the life of engineered components, such as seal faces or bearings, is critical.

Adamant™ is particularly beneficial in applications where Engineers are pushing the boundaries of load, chemical resistance, temperature and abrasion. Where performance limits have already been reached using traditional materials such as hardened steel, Adamant® can extend the life of components, even in the most arduous of applications.

The coating represents a genuine technological step-change in the coating of engineered components for extreme performance. The material, which has excellent load bearing characteristics and wear resistance, derives its uniqueness from Diamond Hard Surfaces’ patented manufacturing process. Not only is the coating applied to components at unusually low temperatures (less than 100 deg C), which means it can be applied to a diverse range of substrates to thicknesses of 40 microns and beyond, but it is also environmentally-friendly, with no pre- or post-treatment required.

Chris Walker, CEO of Diamond Hard Surfaces comments: “We’ve installed a range of machines and equipment at the new facility , which will enable us to provide a coating service for advanced engineering applications for a diverse range of industry sectors, including oil and gas, motorsport, aerospace and medical. Our aim is to be able to turnaround parts within 48 hours to support those industries such as petrochemical processing where downtime is critical.”

Adamant® is currently being used in a variety of applications, including mechanical seal faces for the oil and gas sector. Use of the coating in this application has been proven to increase the dry running time of a seal by as much as 30 times and faces coated with the material have run as much as 2 hours , pressurised and at high speed after having been been evacuated of process fluid.

For more information on Diamond Hard Surfaces, please email: pr@diamondhardsurfaces.com or telephone 01327 354 330. Alternatively, visit our website at www.diamondhardsurfaces.com