News Release

2004 Shuttle flight will take Poeton Coating back into space

2nd December 2003

 
The Space Shuttle flights due to resume next March will again be using technology developed by Poeton Industries, a world leader in surface coatings.

Poeton's Apticote 100 hard chrome coating was used on the first Space Shuttle to coat the titanium orbiter fittings that the huge payload palettes used in the cargo hold.

Says Poeton group managing director Anthony Poeton: "The coatings applied over twenty years ago are still in service today, proving that Apticote 100 has been true to the philosophy of the original Shuttle as a re-usable space vehicle."

He explains that Apticote 100 prevents the galling and fretting that is caused by titanium's low coefficient of friction, whilst minimising the problems of fatigue loss that are often experienced when coating the metal. Also, because chromium is a pure metal, it will not out-gas in space and contaminate other components.

The same coating is used on other space vehicles including Beagle 2 and Rosetta.

On the Beagle 2 Lander for the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, it was applied to the Launch Clamp Ring, which acts as a coupling between the British built Beagle 2 and the launch vehicle. Specialist coatings were also applied to the aluminium leg sub-assemblies of the lander vehicle for the ESA's International Rosetta Mission, whose goal is to rendezvous with comet 46 P/Wirtanen. One of the most exciting episodes of this ambitious mission will involve the first soft landing on one of these cosmic icebergs.
Editors Note
Following a three-year project to develop a low-effluent hard chrome plating plant in partnership with the Environmental Technology Best Practice Programme, Poeton Industries has dramatically improved the quality of its Apticote 100 by introducing a more efficient and environmentally friendly high-pressure filtration system into its processing plant. The process, which costs no more than conventional hard chrome plating, eliminates the problems of pitting that can seriously affect critical aerospace and industrial components.


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File: Space programme