Competent coatings

Competent coatings
Competent coatings

With its success built on ensuring coatings fulfil specific operational aerospace requirements, Indestructible Paint highlights why its coating developments have so much to offer the industry.


The vast range of components that play a key, often safety-critical, role throughout the aerospace industry place advanced manufacturing and processing techniques fully in the spotlight.

Increasing demands on performance and, in many cases, a greater focus on environmental considerations, can often link closely to the use of new materials, resulting in a production environment that is both dynamic and highly challenging. Moreover, stringent regulatory obligations need to be fully observed, many of which while driven by industry-wide objectives, can be shaped by national definitions. The well-established principles of REACH and the Solvent Emissions Directive in the UK, as well as HAPS in the USA, are good examples.

This is the context within which Indestructible Paint has forged a leading international reputation in the aerospace sector. Developers and manufacturers of specialist industrial performance paints and coatings since 1978, the company can point to a long list of aerospace component manufacturers on its customer list.

“Our success in this area has long been built on ensuring coatings fulfil specific operational requirements and on a commitment to ongoing research and development,” comments Brian Norton, managing director at the company's Birmingham premises. “This has been driven both by our own focus on developing greater product performance across the board – for example, from corrosion and heat resistant coatings to those that meet low friction or chemical resistance criteria – alongside our ability and belief in responding to individual customer need. The identification of a specific application objective is often the catalyst for development, whether driven by regulatory or performance considerations. Our laboratory and testing capability is, therefore, well proven in responding to new challenges in the marketplace.”

It is this approach which, in recent times, has led directly to an ongoing series of product advances by the company and, by way of example it draws attention to new coatings that can demonstrate markedly improved corrosion resistance over alternatives that might be seen as more ‘conventional'. Water-based coatings not only offer clear-cut and well-recognised environmental gains over solvent alternatives, says Indestructible Paint, they can also surpass established performance levels by a significant margin.

“The emergence of water-based, anti-corrosive coatings is the current result of a logical progression of product evolution that has acted as a series of sign-posts in the industry for a number of years,” continues Norton. “From the use of high solvent chrome-based materials, to high solvent chrome-free, and then on to low solvent with minimal chrome, the development path is, today, taking the industry one important step further. Today, water-based, chrome-free alternatives are increasingly available and opening up new opportunities for aerospace component manufacturers worldwide.”

Environmental gains

As a means of demonstrating their suitability in a wide range of aerospace applications, the company highlights coatings that have been specifically developed to provide chemical resistance which, in an aerospace context, include those relating to kerosene, grease and oils. Norton points out that chemical performance here can be improved dramatically in terms of consistency and durability.

“For example, while component immersion to 70°C in tri-n-butyl phosphate aircraft brake fluid may typically achieve approaching 400 hours resistance before a coating will soften, our new water-based range of alternatives can be shown to have reached 1,000 hours,” he explains. He adds that the level of gain can often be far greater, with an enhancement up to four-fold demonstrable.

The net result of this increasingly widespread advancement sees many aerospace component manufacturers standing to gain from opportunities to enhance their own production standards while, at the same time, better meeting their environmental obligations. Additionally, the highly-competitive nature of the sector is underpinned by the twin objectives of profitability and maximum safety performance and, in both areas the benefits offered by the new technology needs little emphasis.

“Significantly, the benefits of water-based coatings are of relevance to both the OEM and the MRO sectors of the industry,” adds Norton. “While our focus to date with this technology has been on non-engine components, in such a continually developing and growing field, we believe the greater take-up of water-based coating technology will open up new opportunities for manufacturers in all corners of the industry.”

Promoting the coating

The tangible, proven research that has been at the heart of Indestructible Paint's product development in this area is now well-established with assessment in the laboratory widely matched by real time results in the field. As a result, the aerospace sector – both new build and ongoing maintenance – can turn to a technology that is making clear inroads into the real world.

“We believe the work and the results in this area demonstrate two clear-cut and important conclusions,” Norton ends. “Firstly, it is evident that there are provable advantages on a number of levels that the product development itself can offer the industry. Secondly, and perhaps just as important, it highlights the fact that when manufacturers work closely with specialists in selected fields to address important objectives that improve performance, the benefits cannot be ignored.”

www.indestructible.co.uk

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