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Nevada Today (/nevada-today) / News (/nevada-today/news) / New coating for aluminumdeveloped to replace cancer-causing product

New coating for aluminum developed to replace

cancer-causing product

University engineering team finds elusive self-healing formulation

10/18/2012 - By: Mike Wolterbeek

Amaterials engineering research teamhas developed a new environmentally-friendly self-healing coating for aluminumthat can be used for defense and aerospace

applications. Graduate students David Rodriguez and Dev Chidambaram, principal investigator, are studying an aluminumsample after the scratch test using a
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A research team at the University of Nevada, Reno has developed a new environmentally-friendly coating for

aluminum to replace the carcinogenic chromate coatings used in aerospace applications. The chromate conversion

coatings have been used for more than 50 years to protect aluminum from corrosion.

The team presented their research last week at the international Pacific Rim Meeting on Electrochemical and SolidState Science in Hawaii.

"It was well received at the conference," Dev Chidambaram, lead scientist and assistant professor of materials science

and engineering at the University of Nevada, said. "There is no question that this will be able to replace the

chromate-based coating. Even though the coating formulation is yet to be optimized, the coating has shown

exceptional performance."

Attempts to replace chromate coatings with non-toxic coatings have been underway since the 1980s. The awareness

on effects of chromates was brought to the forefront in 1993 by the real-life incident involving Erin Brokovich and

depicted in the movie released in 2000 of the same name. Although the use of chromates for consumer and

automotive applications has been banned, it is still in use by the defense and aerospace industries under various

exemptions.

The carcinogenic coatings were exempted from the ban due to unavailability of suitable replacement combined with

the high human and financial cost of failure from corrosion. The search for a suitable replacement has been elusive

primarily due to one main characteristic of the coating referred to as "self-healing," the ability of the coating to heal

itself after being damaged or scratched.

When scratched, the coating components from nearby sites migrate to the damaged region and re-protect the

underlying alloy. A short video (http://www.electrochemical.org/) of the coating formation is on Chidambaram's

website (http://www.electrochemical.org/), under the heading "Cool Videos."

Chidambaram's formulation performs comparably to the chromate formula in its ability for self-healing, which is

important to the defense and aerospace industry. The coating can be applied to all aluminum products. The new

formula creates an environmentally-benign molybdate-based coating that provides corrosion protection to

aluminum, used for aircraft and spacecraft. These coatings, when damaged, will re-heal themselves.

Raman microspectroscope to show the presence ofmolybdate in the scratched region. Photo by Mike Wolterbeek, University of Nevada, Reno.
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The University of Nevada, Reno team developed and tested more than 300 coatings before arriving at this

formulation. They used a complimentary suite of advanced surface analytical techniques such as Raman

microspectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, secondary ion mass

spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to conclusively prove the presence of molybdate in the

scratched region. Further, using electrochemical testing, the team showed the coating re-protected itself via selfhealing upon scratch test.

The team includes graduate student David Rodriguez, who conducted the extensive testing on the materials, and

undergraduate aerospace engineering major at the University of Colorado, Boulder intern Roshan Misra, who began

the project as a high schoolsummer intern from Reno High School. The team is still working to optimize the coating

formulation for even better protection.

"This has taken 14 years of work, continuing on work I did at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the

Brookhaven National Laboratory," Chidambaram said.

Chidambaram, as the director of the University's Materials and Electrochemical Research Laboratory (MER Lab), has

obtained nearly $3 million in externally-funded research grants in the past three years and directs eight doctoral

students and one postdoctoral associate. He is also the director of the materials science and engineering graduate

program and the Chemical and Materials Department in the College of Engineering.

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