Surface hardening and highly wear-resistant nanocomposite coatings for woodworking tools - HardCoat

Project summary

Application of progressive surface modifications technology plays a key role in the enhancement of material usage and improvement of surface durability with huge consequences on materials safety and sustainability. This holds especially for protective coatings used in machining and cutting applications. The project aims for the development of novel super hard/durable protective coatings optimized for wood cutting and processing tools via progressive plasma and ion-based techniques. Cathodic arc and magnetron sputtering will be coupled with thermochemical treatment for fabrication of nano/micro hierarchical coating with ultimate parameters. These coatings will be optimized for the best performance in wood machining and cutting in order to outperform the current state-of-the-art materials. Employment of the new generation of cutting tools targets lowering the energy consumption and operational costs by increasing the lifetime and by the broadening of cutting tools operation conditions.