Iranian Researchers Develop Nickel Coating for All Types of Steel by Using Plasma Technology
“One of the most widely used methods of surface modification in industry, specially the industry of our country, is the electroplating process and one of the conventional methods of electroless plating is the nickel electroless method which can cover conductive and insulating surfaces and form continuous coatings with uniform thickness,” said Saber Mirhosseini, a PhD student in Materials Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology.
“One of the problems of these coatings is their hardness and low wear resistance; therefore, in this project, for the first time, in order to improve the wear and tribological properties of nickel-boron composite coatings, nano-diamond particles with high hardness were used as reinforcements and the new heat treatment method of plasma nitriding was used,” he added.
Noting that these coatings have many applications in chemical industries, food industries, aerospace and automobile manufacturing, cutting tools, molding and weapons industries, Mirhosseini said, “The main goal of this project was to obtain nickel-boron electroless coatings reinforced with hard nano-diamond particles and plasma nitriding with favorable wear behavior.”
In a relevant development last year, experts at an Iranian knowledge-based company had also managed to manufacture a nickel-titanium alloy that is widely used in dentistry.
The alloy containing nickel (Ni) and titanium (Ti) is used especially for endodontic instruments.
NiTi alloys offer major advantages over conventional stainless steel endodontic files due to properties such as flexibility, elasticity, and improved resistance to cyclic fatigue.
“We have succeeded in making a nickel-titanium alloy with compositions close to 50-50 percent by weight,” Ali Heidarnia, an expert with the company, said.
This intermetallic alloy has memory effects and superelastic properties. Another important property of the alloy in question is that it returns to its original form when heated to a certain temperature, he explained.
One of the important applications of this alloy is orthodontic wires in dentistry, which has many advantages compared to other orthodontic wires, Heidarnia noted.
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