MEASUREMENT OF COATING DURABILITY BY SOLID PARTICLE EROSION

A comprehensive review of the use of solid particle erosion in evaluat ing the durability of coatings is presented. Various measures of coati ng performance have been proposed in the past. A new and simple method of performing and analysing erosion tests is described, which leads t o the description of coating durability in terms of the dose of eroden t particles of a particular type and velocity needed to remove the coa ting. The method has been demonstrated for paint coatings on steel, an odized films on aluminium, physically vapour-deposited titanium nitrid e coatings on steel and diamond-like carbon films on both steel and a titanium alloy and can provide good discrimination between generically similar coatings of different durability. The method may offer some a dvantages over the scratch test for evaluating coating durability.