Award

Gears are critical components for all military and civilian aircraft systems. The maintenance burden of wear, micro pitting and scuffing on these gears in military aircraft and support equipment is a costly impairment of mission readiness. Through a hybrid thin film deposition process which combines gas, solid and liquid precursors, a new level of molecular manipulation has been achieved which allows for new and novel surface physics altering coatings to be deposited at production levels.  Using these techniques, United Protective Technologies has developed next-generation nanocomposite high-performance coatings that are currently in use on thousands of components for the automotive, aerospace, industrial manufacturing, and defense industries. In this D2P2 effort, UPT will build from these coating architectures and develop and optimize a next generation super-lubricous nanocomposite coating that reduces friction and wear by more than a magnitude to minimize gear failure and maximize service lifetime for Air Force gearbox components allowing warfighters to focus on missions, not maintenance. This is a BLUESKY Submission.