Industrial Equipment
Are sensitive components in your process plant or product getting caked with mineral scale, hydrocarbons, or who-knows-what during normal operations? Adding an anti-fouling coating can improve your ability to clean components or, in some cases, eliminate cleaning cycles altogether. If corrosion issues are forcing you to replace expensive components too frequently, adding a pin-hole free chemical barrier coating can eliminate corrosion while avoiding costly downtime. More Details
Carbon steel plate after exposure to mineral scale: on half treated with an ultra-thin DropWise heat exchanger coating
A surface condensing steam. One side is treated with an ultra-thin hydrophobic heat transfer coating and the other side experiencing inefficient film wise condensation.
Oleophobic non-stick coating (in the foreground) showing oil repellency after erosive sandblasting for 5 hrs. (1.3 CFM @ 40 mph, crushed quartz @ 60 mg/min) outperforms a new smooth Teflon PTFE sheet (in the background). Coating thickness is <15 µm to minimize thermal resistance.
Oil & Gas Tools
The use of dissolvable materials for oil & gas tools is seen as a breakthrough to faster, less expensive operations in a number of different applications (e.g. dissolvable balls and plugs for plug-and-perf completions). However, as the tools react with the downhole environment the moment they’re put into use, it is challenging to control how and when dissolution occurs. DropWise coatings can protect dissolvable alloys from harsh environments up to 350°F until they have completed their job, and be triggered to begin dissolving when needed.
Max Temperature: 350°F
Electronics
From wearable devices and wireless sensors tracking cargo on ships, to outdoor electronics battered by hurricanes …and the occasional kid throwing your favorite device in the toilet, more devices are subjected to harsh environments than ever before. Gasketing and sealing enclosures, in addition to being extremely costly, often leave circuitry vulnerable to condensation. Conventional potting compounds come with unacceptable weight and thickness, and make rework extremely difficult. Liquid conformal coatings are never truly conformal, and often leave pinholes & other weak points. DropWise barrier coatings provide a perfect pinhole-free dielectric insulator whose barrier properties help you protect sensitive electronics from water & salt spray, sweat, solvents, sunscreen, vapors, and dust while adding negligible weight & thickness. Use it as primary protection or as a second layer of defense for mission-critical devices. More Details
An uncoated circuit board operating in tap water immediately starts bubbling & reacting. DropWise barrier coatings protect internal circuitry against even the harshest chemical environments.
Porous Membranes & Filters
Porous membranes have historically been challenging to coat due to the required precision, biocompatibility and the underlying materials used for construction. We can grow coatings on any material to provide hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or various affinity functionality. Need to make a hydrophobic surface hydrophilic? Not a problem. Specifically for membranes and filters, our “dry” coating methods are able to get all the way in and through most porous structures. Attaching ligands to a dense, complex structure? Coat all the way through the structure to ensure the maximum number of binding sites are available. The coating process keeps the object at room temperature, ensuring delicate structures are not exposed to heat or any harmful activation energy. More Details
Cross-section of conformal polymer coating within porous, 50μm thick silver metal membrane.
SEM of polymer coated vs. uncoated 2000Å porous silica bead
