A protective coating developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory can extend the life of costly cutting and boring tools by more than 20 percent, potentially saving millions of dollars over the life of a project. The nanostructure coating, NanoSHIELD, is made from the laser fusing of glassy iron powders. The product was designed for high-wear applications such as tunnel boring, construction, drilling, industrial rock crushing and excavation operations, said Bill Peter, one of the inventors. While the coatings can be applied to any type of steel, its first application was for tunnel boring tools used to cut granite for the Combined Sewer Overflow Tunnel in Atlanta. Also, in 25 years of testing disc cutter coatings at Colorado School of Mines, NanoSHIELD-coated cutters were the first to not spall after one pass at actual rocks.
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