Additive doubles wear resistance of fluoropolymer coatings

It has been developed to target solvent based coatings used across multiple industries including automotive, aerospace and industrial, as well as food manufacturing and consumer product applications.  The additive doubles the wear resistance of standard fluoropolymer coatings without making them abrasive, and maintains or improves the existing low friction properties.  

The new additive consists of diamond particles smaller than ten nanometres in size, which is produced alongside Carbodeon’s existing uDiamond NanoDiamond products, but with a newly designed surface chemistry to suit fluoropolymer materials. The surface chemistry enables the particles to disperse into the coatings without becoming agglomerated, resulting in an extremely high diamond surface area that is often elusive in nano-formulations. This enables the additive to work at very low concentrations, reducing the cost, and making NanoDiamond applicable to a far greater market spectrum. The particles are dispersed in a solvent which is compatible with all major solvent-borne fluoropolymer systems.

Carbodeon CTO Vesa Myllymaki said: “This development has really opened up the possible applications for NanoDiamond fluoropolymer coatings. In a customer fluoropolymer application using Xylan 1010 from Whitford Corporation, we have reduced the wear measurement in 1000 cycle Taber wear tests from 28.0 to 14.7 – that’s basically doubling the wear resistance -  using a small addition of uDiamond coating additive resulting in an increase of the coating material cost of less than ten percent. Carbodeon has filed patent applications for some aspects, in addition to the existing patents covering uDiamond materials.”  

This is Carbodeon’s second application-specific uDiamond NanoDiamond product. In January the company launched uDiamond Plating Additive for Electroless Nickel, a NanoDiamond additive that enhances wear resistance and tribology properties without compromising corrosion resistance.