InnerArmor Coating Reduces Wear

Wear on internal parts is a major problem and cost factor in many industries. What we call “wear” is actually a complex process that may involve many different mechanisms, such as adhesive, abrasive, fatigue, fretting, corrosive and erosive wear.

Wear may also be either “single-phase” or “multiple-phase.” Single-phase wear results from a solid, liquid or gas moving across another surface. In multiple-phase wear, the liquid, gas or solid moving across the surface contains a second phase (particles, asperities, gas bubbles, etc.) that causes material removal.

Adhesive wear, also called "galling" or "scuffing," is caused by the interfacial adhesive forces of solid materials making contact on an atomic level. Many factors can influence adhesive wear, including crystal structure, crystal orientation, number of asperities and the tendency of different materials to form solid solutions or intermetallic compounds with each other.

Abrasive wear is the scratching, scoring or gouging of a surface by a harder material. Often this occurs when the hard surface is a third body, such as a particle of grit caught between two rubbing surfaces, that abrades one or both surfaces. For abrasive wear to cut, the cutting agent must have a hardness greater then 1.2 times that of the material being cut. In addition to hardness, toughness will reduce abrasive wear by preventing fractures and cracks.

The InnerArmor solution

InnerArmor coatings address the problems of wear in an unprecedented way — by bringing together a unique combination of qualities: hardness, smoothness, low surface reactivity, low coefficient of friction, and the formation of a low-wear transfer layer on the counter-surface. In addition, the properties of multi-layered InnerArmor coatings can be fine-tuned to the specific type of wear encountered in an application. For example, in the case of a hard abrading particle, the hardness of the cap layer can be increased. Or the thickness of the coating can be increased to prevent energy transfer to a soft substrate material.

The two comparison charts above illustrate the dramatic performance improvements in increased wear resistance and reduced friction that InnerArmor coatings can provide.