Developing wear and corrosion resistant coatings using a biomimetic approach [Phase I]

Natural biocomposites have the ability to combine brittle minerals and organic molecules into hybrid composites with exceptional fracture resistance and structural capabilities, which serve as an effective guide to the design for bio-mimic hierarchical alternate hard/soft multilayered coatings with superior properties for solid lubrication applications. Hence, one of the ways of overcoming the limitations of the hard coatings and that of the soft polymer coatings is to imitate natures mechanism of the alternating hard/soft layers as observed in nacre. Nacre consists of 95 vol.% of layered aragonite platelets bonded by a thin layer of organic material, and exhibits a toughness some three orders of magnitude higher than that of calcium carbonate, which is attributed to a highly regular brick-and-mortar arrangement of organic and inorganic elements, which combines the elasticity of 1050 nm protein layers (for example -chitin and lustrins) and the strength of CaCO3 tablets 200900 nm thick. In nacre, nature combines hard and brittle compounds and organic molecules into the multi-scale alternative layered composites with exceptional fracture resistance and structural capabilities. Therefore, the present study is focused on the main objective of exploring the feasibility of developing the bio-inspired hard/soft multi-layered coatings with an aim of achieving excellent mechanical properties and high wear durability. The proposed research will be focused on depositing these coatings onto metallic substrates which are commonly used as sliding parts in mechanical components and testing them under the base oil lubrication without any additives to develop an environmental friendly lubrication strategy.