Magnesium cases and covers
Keronite is specified for the cast magnesium engine covers and intake manifolds of the new Bugatti supercar. These parts are partly exposed at the rear of the car. This means that they must have both good corrosion protection and a high quality appearance.

Pistons and cylinder liners There are four or five areas where Keronite can assist the performance of aluminium pistons: Top ring grooves A key location on the piston, this is subject to the force of the top ring under full combustion pressure. It is therefore subject to high dynamic loads and wear. In gasoline engines, aluminium pistons are often hard anodised in this region to prevent wear. However, Keronite has been found to give a factor of four or five increase in top groove endurance compared to hard anodising. This is currently of most interest in Europe and Japan where there engines tend to be designed with higher specific power than US and elsewhere. Reduced wear in the top groove means lower lifetime emissions from the engine, so it is an important factor to get right. Additionally any piston manufacturing companies want to use Keronite to move the top groove closer to the crown to reduced crevice volume and therefore HC emissions.

As well as increasing the top ring groove endurance, other customers have identified that Keronite is or may be useful in other applications on the piston:
- On diesel pistons, one car maker wants to use Keronite as a thermal barrier on the crown instead of zirconia spraying. Thermally-sprayed ceramics cannot easily coat the complicated piston crown geometry and also have poor adhesion, especially during thermal cycling. Keronite can give the capability to overcome both these problems.
- On gasoline pistons, race teams already use Keronite to protect the piston crown from erosion/detonation damage. Higher volume production has now started for road-going engines.
- On diesel pistons, one may be able to use Keronite as an alternative to iron inserts for top ring grooves. The motivation for this is to reduce the moving mass of the piston (and allow reduction in mass of other moving parts like connecting rods and crankshaft) and to increase thermal conductivity and hence heat transfer from the piston to the cylinder wall via the rings.
- Keronite can be considered as a protective coating in the pin hole.
- Several customers are testing Keronite on the piston skirt on both aluminium and magnesium pistons. For example, the Spanish company Tarabusi found some very exciting results in the EU Nanomag project – that Keronite-coated magnesium piston skirts and pinholes displayed low wear and friction: similar to uncoated cast aluminium.

All the properties that make Keronite a viable choice for piston coatings – low friction, high hardness, high adhesion, flexibility – make it a possible choice for cylinder liners also.

Keronite has teamed up with Gramm Oberflaechentechnik for the industrial implementation of Keronite-coated pistons and other automotive applications where only a selected region of the component requires surface treatment. Gramm has many years of experience in this area and today treats approximately 80 million pistons per year with hard anodising or other types of electroplating. This is a key strategic alliance for both partners combining the excellent properties of the Keronite coating with the high-speed selective coating expertise of the Gramm GST technology. For more info contact info@keronite.com

Aluminium FEAD pulleys Pulleys that form part of the FEAD (Front End Accessory Drive) of an engine are subject to wear during a certain endurance test employed by some manufacturers. In this test, the engine is run and sand is directed at the engine a high velocities to simulate desert driving. During this test, sand particles are temporarily trapped between the drive belt(s) and pulleys, causing the pulleys to wear. As a result of one test, a typical steel pulley would lose 3 mm from its diameter due to this wear. Such aggressive conditions would normally preclude the use of lightweight pulleys made of aluminium. However, a Keronite coated aluminium pulley exhibits almost no detectable wear when exposed to this test. This performance affords the use of Aluminium idler, camshaft, ancillary and crankshaft pulleys which in turn reduces all important reciprocating mass

Aluminium pumps
Oil, water, diesel and gasoline pumps usually contain a small number of moving parts, all of which move/rotate at high speed and cause or are subject to wear and/or corrosion. This can apply to the pump rotors, shafts, bushings or the housing. In such cases, aluminium is often already used as a weight saver for one or more of the parts, but usually not all because wear resistance is not good enough. A thin layer of Keronite can be a good surface treatment option to protect the existing aluminium parts and can also allow the steel counterpart to be considered in aluminium.

All magnesium engine
For some time a dream of certain parts of the auto industry has been an all magnesium engine. Much interest and excitement surrounded the introduction of BMW’s magnesium engine block which is a triumph of engineering. However, this still has an aluminium water jacket and cylinder: the water jacket through fears of corrosion if it were magnesium and the cylinder liner because magnesium would not have the required surface hardness to endure the piston wear and combustion chamber pressure. With Keronite, it may be possible to overcome such problems and make a full magnesium block. The USCAR programme is also studying an all magnesium engine block. Keronite is involved in multiple projects in this area, including membership of the USCAR programme.