Research Projects

Steel tubes used in high pressure applications or places where it undergoes corrosion and abrasion poses there is an increased need for maintenance and repair due to reduced life span like power generation, metallurgy, mining, and chemical industry etc. This put forward the need of a novel method of providing inner lined coating; several attempts had been made to accomplish this. The requirement of high vacuum atmosphere and low thickness of produced coatings poses to be a problem. So, to enhance the corrosion resistance, electrodeposition coating technique consisting of electrolytic and electrophoretic deposition coating was introduced which aided in producing thicker coating but was restricted to conductive materials had minimal influence in improving the surface hardness. Hence the method of thermal spray coating comprising of plasma, detonation, warm/cold, high-velocity air fuel (HVAF), high-velocity oxy-fuel (HVOF), flame, and wire arc spraying was introduced to reduce the complexity of process but highly complicated specialized trouble in creating internal coating of tubes/pipes with wide range of diameters and stringent process control makes these cycles to be improper to be utilized. Thus, the technical and financial feasibility of coating the inner tubular surface was further explored. The use of thermoplastic material being adhered to the steel tube, coating the inner surface using cement mortar for water distribution and sewage systems, usage of rubber coated fibre glass reinforced resin pipe for transport of slurry. These techniques tend to be of time consuming and the coatings so produced are of low quality, corrosion reduces the mechanical qualities of the materials while the corrosion products are discharged in various ways that may result in a more intensely corrosive environment or antagonistic aftereffects in different applications and the attainable life time isn't of much acknowledgment. Consequently, it is important to improve or supplant the on-going coating techniques with a process which is both technically and economically feasible and is able to produce coatings of improved thickness and the coating so produced must be compatible for high temperature and corrosive atmospheric application. The present proposal suggests the use of ceramics as the coating and centrifugal thermite process for the production of ceramic lined steel tube. The proposed method tends to provide thicker coating of desired composition uniformly throughout the tube with minimal energy input.