Product durability and longevity are critical for reducing costs, minimizing waste, and ensuring customer satisfaction. Leading manufacturers across diverse industries are turning to advanced engineered materials to radically improve the lifetime and performance of their products.
High Temperature Material Solutions
For applications involving extreme heat and thermal cycling, high temperature materials offer dramatically better durability than conventional metals or polymers prone to oxidation, creep, or melting.
Nickel-based super-alloys like Inconel contain high levels of chromium, allowing them to withstand temperatures up to 2,000°F in jet engine turbine blades, industrial furnace fixtures, and automotive exhaust systems. Their elevated temperature strength prevents deformation or failure.
For even higher temperature extremes over 2,500°F, ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) reinforced with silicon carbide fibers provide an exceptional material solution. According to the people at Axiom Materials, these lightweight, heat-resistant composites are used in leading edges, nozzles and hot sections of futuristic hypersonic vehicles and next-gen aircraft engines.
Superior Wear and Erosion Resistance
Across many industries dealing with particle erosion, abrasion, or sliding wear from friction and debris, new tailored materials are far outperforming traditional candidates in severe duty cycles.
Ultra-hard ceramic materials like silicon nitride show incredible hardness and thermal stability for applications like industrial grinding media, seal rings and bearings operating under heavy loads at high speeds.
Tungsten carbide metal matrix composites (MMCs) provide exceptional erosion and abrasion resistance for downhole drilling components in oil/gas, mining picks and shovel teeth subjected to gouging rock, and shredder components processing metal scrap.
Resilience to Corrosive Environments
Another enormous factor affecting product lifetimes is exposure to harsh chemical environments that cause accelerated corrosion, material degradation, and failure. Here too, advanced materials far outlast traditional candidates.
Fluoropolymer composites like PVDF and ECTFE leveraged extensively in chemical processing plants provide superior resistance to acids, solvents, chlorides, and other aggressive media compared to commodity plastics or rubbers.
Fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites made from specialty resins and glass, or carbon fiber reinforcements enable lightweight, leak-free piping systems that can handle concentrated chemicals, high temperatures and pressures for decades.
Fatigue and Fracture Toughness
For components undergoing repeated cycling stresses or impacts, advanced materials with outstanding fatigue resistance and fracture toughness greatly improve product integrity and durability.
Carbon fiber composites demonstrate superb damage tolerance by effectively arresting cracks and preventing total material failure, even after major impacts. This resilience is critical for automotive crush structures, aircraft components and personal protection gear.
Metal materials like Nickel-based superalloys and titanium offer exceptional resistance to crack growth under high cycle fatigue conditions at extreme temperatures. This prevents premature failure in jet engine disks and other hot section components.
Simplifying Maintenance Requirements
Beyond just improving a product’s usable lifetime, advanced materials can also vastly reduce ongoing maintenance requirements that represent a major lifetime cost burden.
Composites made from fiberglass (FRP) or specialty polymers like HDPE resist corrosion and environmental degradation. This eliminates the perpetual need for repainting, coating or refinishing over the lifetime, drastically cutting labor and material costs.
Newer ceramic and cermet coatings applied to components provide unbeatable wear, abrasion and chemical resistance, essentially eliminating routine replacement of parts subjected to rapid degradation.
The Competitive Advantage
As you can see, integrating advanced engineered materials from polymers and composites to super-alloys and ceramics into product designs provides a huge competitive advantage in terms of durability, lifetime cost of ownership and minimizing waste.
Companies able to leverage innovative material solutions can future-proof their product lines to provide radically longer usable lifetimes with reduced total maintenance burdens compared to past approaches using conventional materials.
Conclusion
Innovative engineered materials represent a pivotal product differentiator giving companies a durable competitive edge others simply cannot match with outdated, commodity material choices alone.
