Coating keeps spark plugs firing longer
A
Poeton Industries product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jan 10, 2005
With temperatures approaching 1000C, 30kV potentials and crushing pressures over 138bar, to perform in the combustion chamber, a spark plug must be precisely engineered and virtually indestructible.
With temperatures approaching 1000C, 30kV potentials and crushing pressures over 138bar, to perform in the combustion chamber, a spark plug must be precisely engineered and virtually indestructible.
The need for absolute reliability and increasing longevity under such hostile conditions is what prompted Federal Mogul to contact Poeton Industries when it needed to apply an electrolytic nickel coating to spark plug centre posts in order to protect the steel pin from oxidation when it goes through its final assembly operation in an induction furnace at 700C.
The application required a coating of extremely consistent quality with a very closely controlled thickness over the whole of the part.
Also important was an aesthetically pleasing nickel oxide finish on the exposed cap, to which the high-tension leads are connected.
To handle the quantities involved - 100,000 per day and more - Poeton set up a dedicated barrel plating line using barrels designed to process 12,000 pins at a time.
The line is fully automated and PC driven, with carefully controlled chemistry for both the plating bath and the pretreatments.
SPC was used to monitor the nickel thickness and coverage, and to weigh the pins and relate the weight gain to the coating thickness.
In addition, Poeton supported the processing operation with metallographic sections and coating analysis using its own on-site laboratory, which is based within the company's Gloucester Technology Centre.
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