Thermal spray coatings applications

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Every thermal spray coatings company wants increasing profits quarter after quarter and year after year. After all that is what every business strives for and why would the thermal spray coatings business be any different. And so, year after year marketing personnel put up goals and sales figures to be accomplished; some of whom do a really great task of breaking down the larger objectives to smaller pieces and then assign individual thermal spray coatings salesmen to go out and drum up more business one way or the other.

But it is not sufficient simply to put up sales targets and beat up on salesmen. While that may work for thermal spray companies that have not had any significant sales efforts in the past, for those that are more mature in this industry, simply cutting the price of plasma coating services is not necessarily the most profitable way to increase sales. In my opinion, marketing people will need to work closely with thermal spray engineering people in order to bring in new jobs at the highest profit levels possible.

This can be accomplished by finding new thermal spray coatings applications. We all know about wear resistance, thermal barrier, abradable, abrasive, anti-galling and other phenomenal characteristics that can be invoked on to the component surfaces. What is needed is for salesmen to go out and solve customer problems using thermal sprayed coatings in applications where they have not even been considered. That is the way that higher prices can be obtained for the services performed. Simply going after knife edge seals and thermal barrier coatings on burner cans is a sure path to frustration because every coatings house is going after these. You need to go after newer thermal spray coatings applications.

That requires a phenomenal amount of effort up front. For example, I once came across a company that was interested in putting on a wear resistant surface on bars used in the extraction of oil from corn. They were using plasma transferred arc welding on these barrel bars. The problem they were encountering was distortion of the bars during the welding process. I recommended changing over to twin wire arc spray using a Tafa wire and believe me it worked like a charm and we ended up coating thousands of these bars. As a side note, there were no Nadcap audits to go through to get certified to coat either

Similarly, one could take a basic nickel chrome aluminum yttrium coating such as Metco 443 and then impregnate it with some material and you will end up with a unique coating with unique properties that you may find applications for in some industry that others have not been to and you can pretty much name your price. Development of new thermal spray coatings applications is the key to increasing sales and bringing in profitable jobs and not just dogs.