High-Volumne Hexavalent-Free Processing of Hard Coatings

Xtalic Corporation possesses a new technology for controlling the nanostructure of electrodeposited metal coatings. Through precise control of the metallic grain size at nanometer length scales, this technology can create coatings with precisely tailored properties. These properties are generally very favorable, and new properties and suites of properties can be achieved in alloy streams where they were not previously accessible. Xtalic has to date focused on optimizing the technology to produce hare, abrasion-resistant metal coating. The current dominant hard metal coating technology is hard chromium. These coatings have favorable properties, but require the use of hexavalen chromium, a known carcinogen, as a precursor material. In addition, the dynamic, high-volume barrel processes commonly used for other industrial electroplating applications cannot be effectively applied for hard chromium due to the low current efficiency of the process. As a result, the processing of large numbers of parts with hard chromium is labor intensive and often economically infeasible. Xtalic can produce coatings with properties that match or exceed those of current hard chromium coatings for many applications, without the use of hexavalent chromium. In the current work, Xtalic will extend this technology to use in dynamic high-volume barreling techniques. In particular, Xtalic will focus on evaluating the feasibility of current waveform control on millisecond timescales for such processes, and of correlating the results of its existing static process with those of this new dynamic processes. The successful completion of this project will provide a new technology to replace current hard chromium coatings that (i) has significantly reduced environmental and worker exposure concerns (ii) has substantially reduced costs due to reduced labor requirements and (iii) produces coatings with superior in-service performance.