The superpowers of coatings make possible the impossible

Bottom motors are one of the most intellectual exploits of engineering humans at all.

Ben Bok, Micro Mateials, a Micro Mateials, a company for the Wales Equipment Test, says, but Jet engines should not be possible.

“The next air is more hot than the metal fusion point under it – which is not good that it is not good,” he explained, noting that this air reaches temperatures more than 1000 ° C.

The designers of jet engines have toured this problem by serving Heat -resistant ceramic paint To the engine blades. Now, researchers are developing the strongest paint that allows engines to run hotter.

“If you get more hot, there is a tremendous savings on fuel and CO2,” says Dr. Beck. By increasing the temperature by only 30 degrees Celsius or so, you may get 8 % fuel, as estimated.

This is the strength of the paint – it radically transforms the functions and capabilities of the basic material. Few people realize how important this is, but these passes and dandruff can be able to form high -performance machines, or ensure that expensive equipment is consistent with the harshest environments.

Dr. Beck and his colleagues are assigned to push the paint to their borders, in order to know how strong or effective is. His client does not always get the results they want. “We have broken coins”, “he recalls a few years ago. “They stormed in Half,” says Dr. Pike.

Besides exposing the paint to high temperatures, the exact material also contains a “woodpecker” device, which is a small diamond pen, which repeats the paint in random sites to test its durability.

Recently, the company has worked with Teer Coatures in the UK to test a product that can be applied to satellite components including gears and holders used in different animated parts.

It is a difficult task, says Xiaological Zhang, from the company, because the paint should protect such ingredients in advance (when it is exposed to moisture in the atmosphere at the Earth level) and also in orbit, against dust and radiation molecules in space. However, it claims that the company has achieved the desired results.

But in addition to protecting spacecraft, paint can prevent astronauts from disease.

Biocytes – Gloopy accumulation of bacteria inside the tubes – They grow faster in low gravity environmentsWhich can be a problem for water supplies or machines that move fluid at space stations or future spacecraft, for example.

“It is known that the vital membranes are causing mechanical failure,” says Cariba Varanasi at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You don’t want this.”

Professor Varanasi and his colleagues developed a set of coatings that make surfaces slippery and thus resist to forming vital membranes. One of this coating was found in an experiment conducted on the International Space Station I worked as intended.

The idea behind the paint is to mix a solid material and lubrication materials. Then this is sprayed on the interior of the tube or tube, which makes this inner surface very slippery.

Professor Varanasi has already published the headlines to develop similar paint The interior of the toothpaste packages – So you can get every other part of the toothpaste. He and his colleagues have marketed technology through their Liquiglide.

Grace, perhaps, is an unlimited feature. Noria Espallagas developed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and colleagues, a silicon -carbide -based coating used in aluminum manufacturing or repair.

It is a type of non -stick frying pan, and this means that molten aluminum layers do not stumble in this expensive equipment. The exact performance of this particular paint is currently a bit of mystery.

“Frankly, we do not really know how to work, the mechanism is not known at the present time,” says Professor Esblagas.

However, the paint is commercially available through its company, Saram coating. ATLAS Machine and Supply, an American company that manufactures and fixes industrial machines, has tried it.

“The real benefit is to extend the lives of tools and improve the quality of the products that are produced,” says Jeremy Ridberg, chief innovation official.

He says that without paint, the Atlas must rebuild the cylinder tools that you use aluminum work every two days. This costs $ 4.5 million annually. But the new paint means that these tools last for a whole week, not only two days, which reduces these reconstruction costs to about $ 1.3 million per year.

The paint can do some amazing things, but it does not always work as intended.

“We see a lot of problems at the present time with parking lots, as their negative fire protection system is divided,” he says, referring to fire -resistant paint sometimes on concrete structures.

His company has also found that the coatings applied to commercial ships do not always prevent Barnacles and other marine life from linking themselves to the body. This problem, known as biofuel, increases friction, and this means that the ship The engine should work more seriously – And burn more fuel.

Although the coatings are available with help, ship owners do not always choose the right to their ships. Dr. Hopkinson says that this choice should depend on the place where the ship sails, the duration of the length due to inactivity, not in movement, etc.

The cost of repairing problems such as these can reach several thousand, or even millions of pounds. “Usually, the paint costs between 1 and 2 % of the project. Hopkinson says:” The problem is, when this happens, the costs become acetic. “

Nevertheless, researchers working in this field say that there are still many opportunities to improve the paint and its new development that can significantly improve the performance of machines or infrastructure in the future.