Environmental Benefits of Durable Products
Peer-reviewed research published in scholarly journals has established that the increases in lifetimes of articles coated with DLC that wear out because of abrasion can be described by the formula f = (g)µ, where g is a number that characterizes the type of DLC, the type of abrasion, the substrate material and μ is the thickness of the DLC coating in μm. For "low-impact" abrasion (pistons in cylinders, impellers in pumps for sandy liquids, etc.), g for pure ta-C on 304 stainless steel is 66. This means that one-μm thickness (that is ~5% of the thickness of a human hair-end) would increase service lifetime for the article it coated from a week to over a year and two-μm thickness would increase it from a week to 85 years. These are measured values; though in the case of the 2 μm coating the lifetime was extrapolated from the last time the sample was evaluated until the testing apparatus itself wore out.
There are environmental arguments that a sustainable economy ought to encourage articles not engineered to lower performance or to fail prematurely. This in turn will reduce the need to support greater production of units and their frequent replacement, which might provide an economic disincentive to manufacturers of such devices.
Currently there are about 100 outsource vendors of DLC coatings that are loaded with amounts of graphite and hydrogen and so give much lower g-numbers than 66 on the same substrates.
Read more about this topic: Diamond-like Carbon
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