With TCHP's maximum combinations of hardness, toughness, and other engineered properties (e.g., thermal conductivity or resistivity, coefficient of friction, …) unavailable in any other materials, better combinations of speeds AND feeds are virtually assured. Major cost reduction results from dramatically increased metal removal rates, extended first-time tool life, productivity, higher yields; reduced flow time, lube-free operation, and improved customer delivery. Using TCHP wear technology, the potential exists for formidable improvements in current fuel efficiency by applying lean-burn technology to control noxious nitrous oxide engine emissions to reduce global warming factors while inherently providing more power and engine durability. TCHP coatings can enable increased recirculation of exhaust gases to burn excess hydrocarbons with less engine wear.

The “designer powder” concept adds most of a tool’s inherent value at the powder stage, where it is vastly more efficient — and effective — than adding value (such as thin coatings) to already-sintered tools. TCHP is very much like conventional WC-Co hardmetals. Applying and leveraging what has been globally learned about carbides for 70 years, EternAloy®;, TCHP development will advance much more quickly than with other new materials. The “designed microstructure” of EternAloy®; allows the engineer to address multiple specialty tool application challenges with fewer TCHP tool, article, or coating variants that will facilitate meeting customer needs while reducing their tool crib inventories and tool selection guesswork.

Because of the external particle coatings of tungsten carbide and iron group binders such as cobalt, the EternAloy®; family of TCHP consolidates into uncoated tools or components in much the same way as conventional carbides. The near-perfect atom-by-atom CVD distribution of the binder phase increases the range of consolidation parameters while avoiding undesirable Ostwald grain growth. TCHPs have been consolidated via conventional press and sinter, hot press, and Ceracon®; methods. Powder Injection molding, sinter-HIP, HIP, and microwave sintering also appear highly feasible. Thermally-applied microengineered TCHP coatings on cylinder liners have also been demonstrated using laser cladding, air plasma spraying (APS), and high velocity oxygen fueled (HVOF) processes. It appears that almost any sintering method will consolidate TCHPs.

To provide a new paradigm combination of properties (hardness + wear resistance + toughness + light weight), the TCHP technology intimately “combines” thermodynamically incompatible materials in all-in-one “building block” designer particles. This cannot be done if the materials are allowed to alloy with themselves as is inherent with conventional materials. The TCHP core and coating separation structure is constrained and preserved during coating and sintering of the TCHP particles. This creates a harmonious mutually-protective symbiosis between the tough coating and hard particles that has eleven advantageous purposes.