'Near Frictionless Carbon' technology

Discussion in 'Materials' started by brian eiland, Aug 22, 2016.

  1. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member

    I read about this new technology quite a few years ago, and just wondered why it has not made more inroads to our boating industry (or all industries for that matter)?

    I had hoped it might solve/assist with quite a number of hurtles, ie....

    Is there any 'new technology' that has applied to these roller furling/reefing bearings under BIG tension loads?? I recall reading about this 'near frictionless carbon' material from one of our national labs:
    http://phys.org/news/2005-06-argonne-near-frictionless-carbon-coatings.html

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255267403_Tribological_performance_of_NFC_coatings_under_oil_lubrication_Near_Frictionless_Carbon

    http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2002-05/dnl-ncc062602.php
     
    Last edited: Aug 22, 2016
  2. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    Brian,

    I couldn't find any of the links???
     
  3. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member

    Sorry, lets try them now.
     
  4. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    So this application is for high vacumn situations.
    I don't think that will work on boats.
     
  5. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member

    Near-frictionless carbon coating nears commercial applications

    Four years and more than 3,000 phone calls and e-mail contacts later, Argonne's "Near-Frictionless Carbon" coating stands on the brink of commercialization.

    A flurry of calls from just about every engineer who works with moving parts followed the announcement in 1997 of a new coating with the lowest coefficient of friction ever measured.

    Not only is the material slick, it's extremely wear-resistant. A sample of the coating on a sapphire substrate, placed in a standard testing machine, survived 17.5 million passes of a steel ball pressed against its surface. After 32 days, the testing machine failed, but the steel ball had left only a barely visible track on the shiny black coating. Publicity about the coating led to a flurry of calls from engineers across the country, who wanted to test the coating on everything from artificial-hip sockets to rocket-sled rails.

    The development led to R&D 100 and Discover awards, invited talks and invitations for keynote speeches for materials scientist Ali Erdemir of Argonne's Energy Technology Division (ET) and national recognition for Argonne and its tribology program.

    But as the initial clamor died down, Erdemir and his fellow tribologists (scientists who study lubrication and friction) John Woodford, Layo Ajayi and George Fenske (all in ET's Tribology Section) turned their efforts to learning how the coating worked - and converting the laboratory curiosity into something industry could use.

    "Turning the coating into an engineering application was not that straightforward," Erdemir said. "When you venture into specific applications, you have to be able to tailor the material to very specific conditions. We needed to figure out how something like this works and under what conditions it works."

    Dozens of companies sent parts to be coated and tested for applications such as diesel fuel systems, bearings, manufacturing equipment and compressors. The coating performed well on many of these parts.
    "Companies liked the coating, and then they'd ask how we could coat 100,000 parts per year," Erdemir said. "With the original lab equipment, we could coat a few tens of small pieces. But for the coating to be commercially viable, you have to process parts by the hundreds, if not thousands. That was the biggest stumbling block."

    Argonne's Office of Technology Transfer secured a cooperative research and development agreement with CemeCon USA, a subsidiary of CemeCon Germany, which makes industrial coating systems. CemeCon provided one of their best coating systems to Argonne, where it is being adapted to produce the NFC coating.

    "It's the Cadillac of coating systems," Erdemir said. "We can coat hundreds of small parts per day."
    Although Argonne's tribology group is able to produce the NFC coating and adapt it to various industrial uses, it wasn't until very recently that they began to understand why the stuff is so hard and slick. The answer seems to be that the carbon atoms in the coating are benefiting from an overdose of hydrogen.

    Black magic
    NFC coating is made in a plasma chamber. Parts to be coated are mounted on a fixture that sits on a rotating table inside. Air is pumped out of the sealed chamber, which is then refilled with a mixture of hydrocarbon gases, such as methane. High voltage creates intense plasma around the parts, breaking apart the methane molecules into its constituent carbon and hydrogen, which begins to coat the parts.

    The ability of carbon atoms to bond in many ways is both a blessing and a curse. It allows for exotic forms like "buckyballs" and "nanotubes," but can be a nuisance when friction is a problem. When two surfaces with regular carbon coatings come in contact, for example, carbon atoms from each surface bond at the contact point. The relative motion of the surfaces then rips bonded atoms from each surface, causing high friction and wear.

    In the NFC coating, the carbon atoms lie down in flat layers, just like a conventional carbon coating. However, due to the hydrogen-rich mix of gasses in the chamber, any available bond on the coating surface may attract a hydrogen atom. Erdemir believes the hydrogen atom loses its electron to the carbon atom's outer shell, leaving the positively charged hydrogen nucleus exposed. Some carbon atoms could even support two hydrogen atoms.

    This may explain the super-slick properties of the coating, especially when two NFC-coated parts come in contact: The hydrogen atoms' positive charges repeal each other. The surfaces are essentially gliding past each other like maglev trains.
    "No matter how hard you press them together, there is a repulsive force overcoming the 'sticktion,'" Erdemir said.

    And since the hydrogen-carbon bond is extremely strong, more so than even a carbon-carbon bond, the surface is highly wear-resistant.

    The tribology group is planning to use scanning tunneling microscopy - a technique capable of resolving individual atoms - to study the coating's atomic structure directly and confirm his hypothesis. The group also plans to use Argonne's Advanced Photon Source and Intense Pulsed Neutron Source to study NFC's microstructure and chemical bonding.

    (The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory conducts basic and applied scientific research across a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from high-energy physics to climatology and biotechnology. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies and numerous federal agencies and other organizations to help advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for the future. Argonne is operated by the University of Chicago as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratory system. — Dave Jacque)
     
  6. Skyak
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    Skyak Senior Member

    The coating must be applied in a vacuum but operates in other environments. The plasma process completely explains why it has taken so long to go into production. You basically have to build a a completely remote control, compact, clean room quality coating machine out of non-outgasing materials along with the material handling machine for all the parts you are going to handle in a batch, along with the vacuum chamber that it must all fit inside. The bigger the chamber, the longer it takes to pump down to near absolute vacuum.

    Based on the little I read it appears that both sides making contact need to be coated.

    I don't know what anyone had in mind for this technology, but it will not be inexpensive or on large parts any time soon. This is for satellites and spaceships -maybe war machines. This is a performance improvement over other crazy expensive coatings.

    Now that the researchers know how it works, maybe they can get high performance from something easier to produce.
     
  7. wet feet
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    wet feet Senior Member

    I find it interesting that carbon seems to have remarkable properties at both ends of the friction scale.I know that carbon brakes were pioneered on the XB70 Valkyrie bomber project and are used in the higher echelons of motor racing.I have also noted the introduction of diamond like coatings in engineering applications http://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=623.
     
  8. Stumble
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    Stumble Senior Member

    Skyak,

    It may also play a role in small but very expensive parts. Like roller bearings for high load blocks. I could easily see this being applied to very high load deck hardware just for the friction reduction alone.
     
  9. talau1978
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    talau1978 Junior Member

    carbon tech.

    if it's out there it must be expensive...lol
     
  10. Petros
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    Petros Senior Member

    I wonder if you can build say internal combustion engines like desiels or gasoline engines, with all of the moving parts coated with this process, and you can run the engine without any motor oil in the crank case (in fact, you can have the connecting rods and crank exposed like on the old engines used in early boats).

    Even if it doubles the cost of making the engine, it might save overall operating costs, and reduced pollution, and improve efficiency by reducing friction. About 10 to 15 percent of the fuel burned in an engine is just to overcome the mechanical drag of the internal parts. It would run cooler too, reduced friction means less engergy from the fuel goes to over come the friction. It would save the weight of the lubricating oil, and it might even allow for lighter weight parts since stress would be a little lower on the moving parts.

    Over the useful life of the engine it might more than save the extra manufacturing costs by reduced fuel consumed, reducing maintenance (no oil changes) and reduced pollution "foot print" by not using lubricating oil over the life of the engine. Consider what an advantage this would be for small boats motors, cars and trucks, and aircraft motors where weight is a critical.
     
  11. Stumble
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    Stumble Senior Member

    Petros,

    It probably can be, but at what cost? If you can reduce the operating cost by 5% but increase the manufacturing cost by 10,000%. It may still be viable in some applications (a generator operating 100% of the time for instance), but not in others, like marine propulsion.

    Rarely is the issue that something can't be done better, it just can't be done better at a reasonable cost. Which is why new tech starts in aerospace, then military, then high end recreational applications. It isn't that they are price insensitive its that their metrics are different.

    NASA assumes every saved pound is worth $10,000 per launch, an airline figures about $1,000/year/pound saved from the aircraft, top end racing sailboats (AC, Tp-52, maxi 100's) probably will pay $500-1,000 to shave 1lb off the boat.

    As the market for this gets larger the increased proficiency tends to drive down cost, to absorb a larger share of the potential market. Eventually (hopefully) it makes it to the recreational market.
     
  12. Petros
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    Petros Senior Member

    we have no idea of the costs right now, so it may be worth doing or not, depending on production costs.

    Applying it to commercial engines such as long haul trucks or cargo freighters, which run long hours at a time, and the fuel saved directly impacts operating costs, would be the first application in an engine.

    When I worked at Boeing some 25 years ago they had an approximate measure of cost for excess weight: for every extra pound of air frame weight, it costs the operator $1 million over the life of the aircraft in lost revenue. That is money out of their bottom line, so weight is a big killer of profits, particularly with a cargo aircraft. Excess weight means there is that much less revenue generating cargo (or passengers) they can carry...over the life of the air plane that is a lot of lost income. That is why they have gone to a "two crew" flight deck (more automated systems), and typically why they hire only light weight flight crews that fly on the airplane.

    I always wondered if an airline could be more profitable by simply charging customers by their total weight, passenger plus luggage weight, times their rate. only slim and lightweight people would choose that airline (and families with lots of children to go visit Disneyland or gradma). That would keep the costly really overweight customers away. I am sure the government would put a stop to that practice real fast.
     
  13. Stumble
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    Stumble Senior Member

    Petros,

    There was an airline that charged by the pound (passenger plus luggage) the media went nuts over it and the public was incensed. But from a practical standpoint I think it's a good idea.
     

  14. Petros
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    Petros Senior Member

    Do you remember who that was?

    I imagine is was only overweight people that were feeling "discriminated" against. Yet when shipping cargo or luggage, weight is what determines the cost.

    Perhaps slim people should complain they should get charged less for entering an "all you can eat" restaurant. I used to frequent those places, but noticed that most customers were really obese, some morbidly so (they could not even walk). I would loose my appetite and realized that I was paying for their lunch because I could never eat nearly as much.
     
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