One trend in coatings (to me) is to make the coatings cheaper.  Until now this was done by building bigger machines, to coat more part at the time.  But this ended up with the situation that most small&medium company cannot access anymore the coating service since they do not have the large series of parts to be coated.  Mixing different parts in a same batch is not optimal, this discourage also the users whenever they would want to have coated parts.  Each coating has to be adapted to the usage of the part, everybody knows that a first trial coating is never perfect.. and that in fact, only those customers keep on ordering that have been lucky on the first rial coating.

So we need more flexible coating machines, where test can be run without the huge series..  ideal would be some part-to-part processing.

But that for the throughput times have to be much, much faster.. the processing time of a coating should go down to some minutes (instead of hours today).

So very fast deposition techniques are needed.

All of our high-tech coatings are PVD or CVD like, plasma assisted (somehow) vacuum processes. They rely on the non-equilibrium energy input of ion bombardement.

Wanting faster processes, means having higher density plasmas.

One can then get into trouble because the energy input is too large for the sample to accomodate (would it only be the heating of hardened steels).

But we are not there for now..  but parts-2-parts coating techniques are needed that can do a coating in 5 minutes (air-2-air).

These machines would be small (cheap) and flexible, and economically friendly to small series of parts for the small&medium business.

This would be a gain for everybody, to be able to have the maximum of technology on every part.

Dear all,

I think the long term performance is the decisive factor. Even high cost may be reduced if the long terme performance is insured. The overall cost of raw materials is usually balancing up and down relative to the world global economy, so for me it is not really a sharp factor. The performance I meant here includes also the environmental eco-friendly parameter, since any future developments must take it into account, whatever the prices are. Paying less for the investments, paying too much for pollution control, and other problems. Regards

Good point too..  of course for all of our future behaviour , we should take in account what we can still afford from the environmental point of view. And yes, we may not need more high-tech if our ecosystem cannot hold it.  5 billions of years of earth history to set up a kind of equilibrium, at least a running eco-system, until homo-modernicus came in and puts everything on the wage within 150 years..  from the time the west (the french) thought manhood is free..  the day we killed god (Nietzsche around 1885).

Would be nice if you could by year 2020 or so, replace our technology and money god of today to something new.. 

Superhydrophobic surfaces for applications in seawater

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001868615000160

A facile method was adapted to make superhydrophobic (SHP) titanium in which a synergistic combination of surface roughness and surface chemistry was utilized. In the first step, titanium was mechanically polished and pickled followed by anodization. The next step was to dip coat the samples with silane solution and then were cured at 110 °C. Influence of different synthesis parameters such as silane concentration, number of dip coating and curing temperature on water contact angle (WCA) was studied and conditions were optimized to achieve a WCA of 150°. The wetting properties of the samples were elucidated using contact angle meter and the water just rolled off the modified titanium surface with a slight tilting. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were used to study the morphology and surface roughness of the silane coated titanium samples. Grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), attenuated total reflection-infrared spectroscopy (ATR-IR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were used to analyze the chemical composition of the coatings which confirmed the presence of silicon along with titanium and oxygen. Immersion studies in sea water and nitric acid medium for 15 days indicated the stability of the coatings with minimal variations in contact angle.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014ApSS..292..650V