Tic Coating and Process Strategic Acquisition:
Tic CVD coating process purchased from CSEM in Switzerland. Tic Ball coating is a proprietary ball coating process developed in the 1980’s by MIT Draper Lab and CSEM in Switzerland. The Tic Coated Ball is a 80 um thick layer of Titanium Carbide Ceramic coated on a high performance stainless steel ball.
The Tic Coated ball is used in high performance bearings. The ball will work in bearing environments when normal lubricants begin to fail. This includes high speed and high temperature differential environments. The Tic ball is used in bearings specified for numerous strategic and tactical military weapons and guidance systems as well as space based commercial systems.
In 2008 CSEM announced that they wanted to sell the reactor and process, transfer the technology, and get it out of Switzerland. Several million dollars was required.
This change would affect numerous contracts for bearings for various US military and commercial aerospace projects.
In my role I was responsible for the coater as my supplier, and for my customers the bearing producers. I took on the project of moving this process to the United States.
The problems were as follows:
1. Find a new coating source in the United States
2. Find the money to make the acquisition.
3. Create an approval process to insure that the technical transfer was effective.
4. Plan production to insure that time was available to shut down and re-qualify the process.
5. Involve the bearing producers and their customers in the process so that everyone knew the expectations.
Meeting were held with the bearing industry and possible coaters were identified and vetted. Within a short time we settled on BryCoat of Oldsmar, Florida as the best candidate.
The money required for the acquisition was considerably in excess of the value of the assets. Most of the money was to cover years of development work incurred. We reached out to the US Government through the Missile Defense Agency and found a willingness to support this acquisition since this technology is important to many military applications. A process was put in place to arrange funds for BryCoat to negotiate the purchase and to pay for engineering required to certify the process to the original standards.
Working with the bearing industry and retired employees from Draper Lab an approval process was created that matched the original approval process. This was agreed to by all and funding was arranged with assistance from the US Government.
There was an 18 month grace period that allowed the industry to plan for production during a shutdown period that was expected to be 9 months. This was largely successful.
1st quarter of 2007 the process was in production and testing was started.
The final test results were presented to the bearing industry at the ASTM Committee F34 at the International Symposium on Rolling Element Bearings in May 2007.
Shipment began at this point.
References:
Increased performance of bearings using TiC-coated balls.
Savan, Boving, Fluehmann, Hintermann
Journal de Physique IV, 1993
Evaluation of U.S TiC-Coated Balls
Robert Price, The Bearing Consultants, Randolph, Mass.
ASTM Committee 34 International Symposium on Rolling Element Bearings