Posted December 14, 2010
By Mike Sung
Title: MICRO-CRYSTALLINE ANODIC COATINGS – A REVOLUTIONARY PLATFORM TECHNOLOGY IN CORROSION PROTECTION
Tim Cabot, Jack Tetrault and Mike Sung
Presenter: Jack Tetrault, Sanford Process Corporation; COO Duralectra-CHN, LLC
Summary
A basic requirement for finishing aluminum is to protect the volatile untreated surface from corrosion attack. However, current solutions provide insufficient protection and therefore limit the areas where aluminum can be used or require more expensive solutions such as polymeric overcoats.
The advent of a new technology that retained many of the design, process economics, and engineering characteristics of anodic coatings while fundamentally changing corrosion resistance would solve many existing problems and open broad new uses for aluminum.
In 2010, the parent company of The Sanford Process Corporation, Duralectra-CHN issued a set of patents on Micro-Crystalline Anodic Coatings where conventional amorphous oxide created by Type II/Type III anodizing was converted into closely knit micro-crystalline structures. Phase changing a portion of the oxide in this way creates an effective barrier to corrosion attack by dramatically lowering the rate of chemically induced solubility of the oxide (for instance in the presence of high/low pH chemistry, galvanic conditions, etc.) while lowering overall surface to substrate activity. Further, the novel coating protects entrapped dye colorants in the pores from superheated steam allowing articles to be sterilized and/or cleaned in dishwashers without fading and discoloration.
The paper provided for this conference will examine this new oxide, how it is constituted, and the performance results in various application studies vs. conventional anodic coatings.
