Additive doubles the life of fluoropolymer coatings

The additive doubles the wear resistance of standard fluoropolymer coatings without making them abrasive and maintains or improves the existing low friction properties.

The new additive consists of diamond particles smaller than 10nm 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.

Vesa Myllymaki, CTO, Carbodeon, commented: “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 1,000 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 for some aspects, in addition to the existing patents covering uDiamond materials.”