- 13 December 2006 -


John Crane to commercialize diamond seal faces

John Crane Inc is to collaborate with Advanced Diamond Technologies, Inc (ADT), based in Illinois, USA, to develop and commercialise the latter's Ultrananocrystalline Diamond (UNCD) technology in order to improve the friction and wear characteristics of mechanical seal faces.

Although synthetic diamonds have been used for decades in cutting tools and abrasive applications, the difficulty of integrating real diamond with other materials has, up till now, eliminated it as an engineering material for mechanical seals.

UNCD is a crystalline diamond film consisting of nano-sized grains grown through a patented chemical vapour deposition process. UNCD surfaces are extremely hard and wear resistant, as strong as single-crystal diamond, and can be grown on the lapped surface of a seal face to produce a very thin film, mirror smooth, with excellent adhesion, John Crane says. In operation UNCD exhibits very low friction resulting in lower heat generation which saves energy and improves seal performance and reliability.

John Crane says that it is targeting difficult applications involving poor lubricating fluids, liquids above their atmospheric boiling point, and abrasive slurries.

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