MATERIALS IN DESIGN & PROTOTYPING FEATURE
Opening up the applications for NanoDiamond fluoropolymer coatings
Carbodeon has developed an additive which can double the wear resistance of standard fluoropolymer coatings used across industries including automotive, aerospace and industrial. Gavin Farmer, business development manager, explains
T
raditional polymer additive material selection requires designers to select
from a range of pre-existing materials. Every now and then something new comes along, but usually this is a completely different material and might solve some problems while bringing with it new challenges. Carbodeon’s uDiamond NanoDiamond
materials provide a solution to this problem. Diamond offers such properties as strength, hardness, wear resistance, thermal conductivity and chemical resistance, and in NanoDiamond form it becomes an additive which can be introduced into other materials in selected concentrations. Because the properties of diamond are so extreme, even a small diamond content will drastically shift the properties of other materials, especially polymers. The latest development from the
Finnish company is the uDiamond Coating Additive For Fluoropolymer Coatings, which doubles the wear resistance of standard fluoropolymer coatings without making them abrasive, and maintains or improves the existing low friction properties. This 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.
ADDITIVES The new additive consists of diamond particles smaller than 10 nanometres in size which are 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. According to Carbodeon CTO, Vesa
Myllymaki: “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 10%. Carbodeon has filed patent applications relating to this product, 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.
MATERIAL SOLUTIONS Wear resistant, low friction surface modifiers form about half of Carbodeon’s industrial applications. The remainder involve the use of NanoDiamonds to modify thermoset and thermoplastic material properties, sometimes for mechanical performance but increasingly as a means of improving the thermal conductivity, without affecting the electrical isolation properties of the material. Diamond is an unusual material which is
very thermally conductive (>2000 W/mK) but is electrically di-electric. It therefore lends itself as an additive to those materials used in electronic devices –
The NanoDiamond fluoropolymer coating additive can double the life of coatings in a range of industries including automotive, aerospace and industrial
such as chip packages, LED luminaires and mobile phones, where there is an ever-increasing need to dissipate heat from devices while still maintaining electrical isolation properties. Traditional fillers used for these functions, such as aluminium oxide or boron nitride, also possess this property combination, but to a lesser extent, so a larger amount of those fillers is required and this in turn adds weight and reduces mechanical strength. So, by incorporating
small amounts of NanoDiamond, the polymer materials can be fine-tuned to give a much better optimisation of thermal
The solution is suitable for applications ranging from engineering parts to cooking pans
conductivity, weight and strength. Currently, the uDiamond NanoDiamond
material range consists of a variety of powdered or liquid dispersed materials. Each application requires customers to specify their material requirements and a custom material formulation is made, such as a coating or a polymer compound, for example. Volumes, however, are growing, and Carbodeon is building relationships with compounders, formulators and surface treatment specialists to enable product engineers to select the properties they require and order ready to use materials such as coatings or thermoplastic compounds in the very near future. The company even has plans for creating materials suitable for 3D printing.
Carbodeon
www.carbodeon.com
DESIGN SOLUTIONS | MAY 2016 29
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