Greenmetalcoat

The consortium of this project brings together diverse and complementary partners from industry (voestalpine Stahl and AMAG AG) and science (CEST, TU-Vienna and JKU) with a similar interest in minimizing resource and energy consumption, particularly in the automotive and aerospace industries, through the application of new pre-treatment and coating processes. Approaches to meet the target will be done by optimizing the surface pre-treatment step. This step is applied to the body structures before coating to improve corrosion protection, however, they consume high amounts of water as well as energy/heat and have partly extensive filtration requirements for the used baths. A reduction of the consumed recourses, the use of more environmentally friendly substances and the enabling of lower coating thicknesses are the main aim of this area topic. In the pre-treatments for the automotive industry, especially in activation and phosphating, the usual trication-phosphating should be replaced by nano-treatments, such as with Zr oxide layers, as these are free of harmful Ni.