Near Frictionless Carbon Coatings for Marine Applications

"Corrosion costs the Navy 26 man-years per year per ship in maintenance, or about 6500 man years per year ($975 million) for its entire 221 surface ship battle force. This includes maintaining coatings of superstructures and catwalks, interior bulkheadsand decks, flightdecks and topside decks, bilge wet spaces, tanks and voids, topside camouflage and freeboard, and machinery space passageways. Cathodic protection is used for underwater hull corrosion protection. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) hasdeveloped a new thin film lubricant, known as Near Frictionless Carbon (NFC), that may offer a solution to many of these corrosion problems. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of this proposed solution, Technology Assessment & Transfer (TA&T) willmeasure tribological, wear, and corrosion properties of NFC films in sea water spray/fog and compare the results with similar measurements of materials currently used by the fleet. TA&T also will subject these films to accelerated corrosion exposure inorder to assess long-term behavior. The Center for Corrosion Science and Engineering (Code 6130) at NRL will perform these accelerated corrosion exposures. During the Phase II effort, the Corrosion Control Group (05M) in NAVSEA will review and recommendtesting. Since NFC films also perform well in a dry, low pressure environment, an additional applications may be in the space industry especially to lubricate attitude control systems. Othe