May 18 2005
Sandvik Materials Technology has introduced a new product form and launched a range of surface engineered stainless steel strip materials.
Manufacturing processes have been developed to apply coatings with excellent adhesion and purity to stainless steel strip, enabling selected combinations of substrates and surface layers to provide new, enhanced and often unique material properties.
A high degree of manufacturing flexibility enables surface engineered strip to be tailor made to customer specifications. Properties such as electrical conductivity, low resistivity, corrosion, surface function or decorative appearance can be met or enhanced, making the new Sandvik surface technology products ideal for the electronics industry, for example.
Typical electronic applications include tactile domes, contact springs, shielding and improving the soldering properties of electronic components. Surface engineered strip material into the electronic market will be branded Sandvik Santronic ™.
The new products provide opportunities to produce complex coatings on any stainless steel strip with multiple layer options and few limitations on coating material. Specific customer requirements are met by selecting the optimum combination of substrate material and surface layer.
The surface layers can consist of any metallic element, for example aluminium, nickel, copper or silver and mixtures of elements or binary compounds, such as aluminium oxide (Al2O3) or titanium oxide (TiO2).
Coatings can be single or double-sided, with thicknesses ranging from tenths of nanometers up to a few microns. They can be different on each side of the strip and are supplied with a max thickness tolerance of +/- 10 % of the surface layer and guaranteed levels of surface roughness. All coatings have an extremely low content of impurities and foreign elements - a key property for creating excellent electrical and contact properties.
Because of the excellent adhesion between substrate and surface layer, the new strip products are cold formable and bendable to tight radii. A high level of strip flatness facilitates processing operations such as cutting, stamping or etching.
Strict quality control procedures ensure specified material properties are met.
http://www.smt.sandvik.com/