Titomic’s Post

Transcript

What we do is we take a really small fine powder, we introduce that into a supersonic gas stream, and while we're introducing that powder into the gas stream, it gets taken to a supersonic velocity, exits out the end of a conversion diversion rocket nozzle hits the substrate or whatever part you're spraying that onto, and then that will plastically deform and adhere to the material. So what that allows you to do is repair parts, not in the traditional way that you would have to create a melt. Ohh, you're actually using kinetic energy to blend those particles together. Advantages to this process? Not introducing any heat into the substrate allows for repairs of parts without introducing a heat affected zone. Often when you do a Weld repair or a repair that introduces heat into a part, you can risk riddling that part or changing its properties in a way that could catastrophically fail that part or that item that you've sprayed onto. Being able to do that with cold spray process is a huge advantage, especially when you're in the field. The system, being very mobile and very portable, allows you to take it into the field, spray your part often without having it did two disassemble your equipment. You'll be able to spray that part, dress that part and bolt it back together and get it back in the field quite fast as opposed to I guess in a traditional sense. It would require you to completely disassemble the part, take it to a machine shop, take it off site, either replace that part or have to. Manufacture that whole part. Welding does have its place. If you were to be doing a structural join of say, two materials, it would be great to use a welder. Whereas often a lot of the time in a defect or it damages occurred to a part, you may still have, you know, 98% of your structural rigidity in that part. And there may be a bearing surface that has worn down or a seal surface. In a traditional sense you would need to create a Weld pool, and to do that you need to take that material that you're working with to pass its melting point, actually creating a liquid pool of metal. That's then solidifies and you would post machine that afterwards. Whereas with our process it's a mechanical bond between your heart and your coding that you're applying. So that allows for repairs to be done on the shaft without actually having to create that Weld pool, introduce those stress and potentially change the properties of the material that you're spraying onto. Often when we talk about comparisons to traditional methods. Often the preparation and the post prep can be quite a large part of that time frame that the repair actually takes. So preheating, post heating often, machining, rework. If you can use a machine where you know is fit for purpose and you can do the repair in a short amount of time. Obviously massive savings on cost associated with lead times. Scrapping parts is another thing. Often there's jobs that just can't be done with the traditional method, so using this equipment can often save jobs. In the workshop from being scrapped and and cost association with ordering a new parts, downtime on equipment waiting for those parts to arrive is also a big one. Big advantage of using this equipment is the ability to join dissimilar metals. So with your traditional sense of I guess welding or metal sprays, often you can't join two different materials together. Having that mechanical bond between the two materials allows you to join. You know it may be aluminum on mild steel, it may be copper on mild steel or copper aluminium. The different materials are endless when it comes to pulse brain general, but in this system our materials that we generally use are a nickel. Aluminium, copper, zinc for corrosion protection and tin. A customer within the rail industry having worn damaged shafts due to bearing wear when overused and not having a readily available repair method besides having to remove the shaft and replace it or remove the shaft completely from the assembly and looking at alternative methods of repair. And what we were able to do is leave that draft assembled onto the higher assembly and spray the part and recover it with a two week turn around time. So that was pretty machining spray and post machining and post treatment which significantly reduced the lead time for the customer and was really good result for them. A customer that was looking at repairing nickel plates, there's no current repair method for them that are quite expensive, just get scrapped when they're found to have leaks due to work on them and erosion. And we were able to use the low pressure system to pour it nickel powder down and repair it with a coating. The great outcome of that was that we were able to see Warren gasket surfaces that typically would leak that not load carrying, but they are relying on that geometry to seal the surface and we were able to spray. A small area with a significant cost saving and lead time saving to the customer. So that was a really good result.