Major breakthroughs have been achieved in China’s high-performance sealing coating technology

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Major breakthrough achieved in China’s high-performance sealing coating technology 2025-07-31 17:39:26 Recently, the Mining and Metallurgy Group made a significant breakthrough in \"new types of wear-resistant sealing coating technologies.\" This advancement not only resolved the long-standing challenges that have hindered the development of high-end equipment in China but also enabled the country to reach international leadership levels in this critical technological field. As critical components in the fields of national defense and energy, aviation engines, gas turbines, and steam turbines see their performance improvements constantly playing a key role in **strategic development. As the most widely used coating in such equipment, the wear-resistant sealing coating can be regarded as an \"invisible guardian\" that ensures efficient and safe operation: it not only enables precise dynamic sealing to prevent damage to the rotor due to friction, but also increases the efficiency of the equipment by 1%, reduces energy consumption by 1.5%, and doubles the lifespan of the hot-end components. It should be understood that improving the efficiency of gas turbines by 1% requires nearly a decade of relentless effort from researchers around the world. However, the development of this “magical coating” is far more difficult than imagined. It must operate for extended periods in extreme conditions of high temperature and high speed, requiring both \"high wear resistance\" to protect the rotor and \"high adhesion\" to prevent it from coming loose. This contradictory requirement of being both soft and hard is why, despite decades of research by European and American experts, it remains considered a \"cutting-edge technology,\" and accidents related to it occur frequently. Our country started later; in the early days, coatings commonly faced problems such as peeling, rotor wear, and short lifespan, which became bottlenecks hindering the development of high-end equipment. Faced with this challenge, the technical team embarked on a journey of over twenty years to find a solution. With the support of more than a dozen high-level projects such as those related to specialized materials and the 863 Program, the team took the establishment of a testing platform for simulating high-temperature and high-speed conditions as a starting point, and successfully uncovered the wear mechanism of coatings under extreme conditions, as well as the influence of various components on their wear resistance. On this basis, they innovatively proposed a design concept of \"synergistic interaction between the skeletal components and the wearable components,\" thereby overcoming all the key technologies across the entire chain from \"design to material to coating to evaluation.\" Today, the team has developed 8 types of long-lasting, wearable sealing coating materials that cover the entire temperature range, with performance at the international leading level. Meanwhile, the independently developed wearable testing machine for simulating actual operating conditions is capable of conducting precise tests at temperatures of 1200°C and linear speeds of 450 m/s, and it also features a chip collection function, placing it at the highest international standard. These achievements have established China’s first fully independent and self-controllable high-performance wearable sealing coating technology system.