Objective
There is a great potential interest in the molding industry regarding production of moulds for low and mid series of plastic products. Actually, alloy steel moulds are used for the fabrication of low, mid and high series products. For mid and low series steel moulds are very expensive and they have excessive mechanical strength. Light alloys are now used with success in the production of prototypes for mould design optimization, that are adequate only for very short series, but they can be an interesting solution for low and mid series, if the surface resistance is improved. Ceramic hard coatings can be a solution for this problem. However, great difficulties related to the important mismatches between the mechanical and thermal properties of the Al alloys and the hard ceramic coatings lead to in service failure. In this project, this problem can be overcome by optimizing the system based in Ti-Al, with variable nitrogen contents, owing to the fact that Ti-Al (N) has high hardness and a much higher thermal expansion coefficient that traditional hard coatings which can significantly decrease the thermal stresses during the deposition. New opportunities will be created for all
Funding Scheme
EAW - Exploratory awards
Coordinator
2431-967 Marinha Grande
Portugal
Participants (1)
42289 Wuppertal
