Coating & Finishing

With over 100 key thermally sprayed applications within aerospace turbine engines, Bodycote can provide surface technology solutions for a range of properties including wear control, corrosion resistance, thermal efficiency and conductiveness to protect against lightning strikes. Without these surface treatments, today’s aircraft components would not operate to the required standards.

Thermal spraying allows coatings of high performance materials such as metals, alloys, ceramics, cermets or carbides to be applied to relatively easy-to-work and more economical base materials. The various processes can offer excellent improvements in component performance and lifetime.

Thermal spray refers mainly to two robotically-controlled surface treatment techniques: HVOF and plasma:

High Velocity Oxy Fuel (HVOF) coating:

HVOF has an exceptionally high coefficient of adhesion, commonly exceeding bond strengths of 12,000 psi between coating and substrate. This allows HVOF coatings to maintain nearly 100% of their wear resistant qualities in high temperature environments, an especially useful attribute for components that must function in the absence of proper lubrication for extended periods of time.

Thermal spraying is an attractive treatment technique as it offers a wide choice of materials and processes with reduced impact on the environment when compared to conventional plating processes. Almost any metallic or ceramic can be applied to a huge range of materials with excellent bond strength and without distortion of the substrate.

Plasma spraying:

Offers versatility in deposition of materials starting from pure metals and alloys, through abradables to carbides and ceramics. This unique feature allows use of this technology in various applications improving surface characteristics such as wear resistance, thermal and electrical conductivity or insulation, coefficient of friction, corrosion resistance, high temperature oxidation resistance and biocompatibility.

Combustion spray

Combustion spraying is a thermal spray coating process used to apply relatively inexpensive coatings that typically contain high levels of oxides and porosity with the option of achieving a rough surface finish.

In the combustion spraying process, a gas stream produced by the chemical reaction between oxygen and a combustion fuel heats a consumable propelling it onto a substrate to form a surface coating.

Combustion spraying offers a cost effective alternative for applying metallic and ceramic coatings in a less demanding environment, whilst providing corrosion and wear resistance, heat and oxidation resistance and clearance control for abrasives and abradables.

Precision finishing

The precision nature of ceramic coating and any associated thermal spray coating requires accurate measurement, finishing and quality inspection. Together with daily monitoring of coating parameters and metallographic quality this accuracy ensures that our coatings are of the highest integrity.

Our facilities are equipped with precision machining and finishing machines capable of coating removal for repair of worn components, and post-coating finishing to the highest standards.

Sealing solutions

Bodycote provides a range of organic sealants, plus our proprietary thin-film technology. Our technology uses ceramic to seal existing coatings such as chrome and tungsten carbide. The ceramic seal thermo-chemically diffuses throughout the coating, chemically bonding to both the coating and the substrate and filling any micro-cracking and porosity with super-hard ceramic particles. The seal prevents corrosives from attacking the substrate via blistering and undermining of the coating.