After conducting a few experiments on lawn mower blades, a company called Thermal Spray Technologies, or TST, has spawned into a leader in metal coatings that change the properties of the surface of metals.
The coatings themselves change the conductivity of metals and even make them resistant to corrosion and other damage. Effectively, the coating, which is just a few thousands of an inch thick, can, in some cases, raise the lifetime of a mechanical part from 200 hours of use to 1,000.
"Thermal spray coatings can be engineered using most metals, carbides, ceramics, and plastics to create a coating with the optimum properties for your application," says Thermal Spray Technologies on its website. "Thermal spray coatings can be applied to a broad range of materials, from metals to composite materials."
TST has found success in a wide range of industries, serving manufacturers of equipment in the oil, gas and agriculture industries, as well as for motorcycles and medical equipment. It has even found applications in the food industry, coating valves and parts.
The origins of the company are also interesting. In 1984, Dick Wilkey, president of Fisher-Barton, an agriculture equipment company, contacted Frank Warzola, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looking for graduate students in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Wilkey's idea was that he wanted to see if a thermal spray could create sharper blades. Bill Lenling took on the challenge, eventually founding TST in 1992 as a subsidiary of Fisher-Barton.
"Thermal spray is usually needed where the requirement gets beyond what the component can do by itself," said Lenling in an interview for a report with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "A steel part can only be hardened to a certain level. The coating can take it to another level and still be economical to manufacture."
Not everything can be used in a coating, however, Lenling says that if something can be melted, it's likely that a coating can be created with it. Not only that, but despite the fact that such high temperatures are used in the process, little of the energy ends up on the part being coated.
While a range of applications for the coatings have been discovered, the team is hard at work looking for more, with around 20 percent of employees at TST having degrees in engineering.
"We were not always the first to use a particular coating technology, but for the majority of our applications, we were the first to design and develop it," continued Lenling.
