ON THE MARKET
New products and services for the helicopter industry. Typical extracts from the current issue ...
* Tecvac of Swavesey, Cambridge has developed a new process for applying diamond-like carbon (DLC) coating on the internal surfaces of flying parts and aerospace engine components, which the company claims can reduce friction losses to very low levels and provide a very hard corrosion-resistant film.
Inner Armor, an enhanced plasma coating process, will apply DLC coating up to 50 microns thick to the internal surfaces of tubes and bores up to 3 metres in length and Tecvac has already identified applications in control systems, fuel engineering, fuel management and delivery and hydraulics systems, where DLC coating has previously proved difficult or impossible to apply. Tests have also demonstrated superlative corrosion and erosion resistance. High performance was shown in salt spray tests to meet US standards and the very high wear resistance in these tests was indicated by a very low attrition rate of less than 0.0005 microns per hour,.
Inner Armor DLC coatings can be conducting or insulating, and can withstand high loads at operating temperatures of 405ºC. This enables many hollow engine parts to be coated with DLC, and allows the replacement of expensive high performance alloys with lower specification steels.
* Sagem Avionics and Vector Helicopter Services displayed a Bell 206 JetRanger with the new integrated cockpit display system (ICDS) at the Helicopter Association of Canada trade show in Calgary on 5-6 April. The newly refurbished helicopter is owned by Slave Lake Helicopters.
Sagem, which has developed the ICDS, is teamed with Vector to integrate and obtain the necessary Supplemental Type Certificates for the system, which was launched just over a year ago. Since then the ICDS has been made available on a number of platforms, including the Bell 205, 206, Eagle 212, 407, Sikorsky S-61, Eurocopter AS350, Robinson R44 and the MD Helicopters MD500.
To date Vector has performed more than 460 installations, upgrades and legacy retrofits on a variety of helicopters for customers, including commercial and fleet operators, law enforcement agencies, emergency medical services and personal owners.
