The European ECOLAND project consortium held its project development meeting for month 17 on 17 July at CIDETEC Surface Engineering. The day before, taking advantage of their participation in the meeting, representatives of LIEBHERR-AEROSPACE visited the Centre.
ECOLAND, “Development of ECO-friendly protection procedures for LANDing gear aluminium alloys”, is led by CIDETEC with the participation of LVH Coatings (United Kingdom) and CTME (Miranda de Ebro). The project, financed by Clean Sky JU under the Horizon 2020 programme, has a budget of 347,000 euros and a duration of 23 months.
LIEBHERR-AEROSPACE Lindenberg GmbH is renowned in the European aviation industry as a manufacturer of landing gear and flight control and drive systems. The company acts as the project's Topic Manager and aims to develop an alternative treatment to chromic anodising based on anaphoresis in order to ensure compliance with the REACH regulation.
Anaphoresis consists of applying an organic coating by immersion using electric current and offers the advantage of enabling the painting to be carried out without the need for prior priming. This makes it doubly attractive because it reduces the application time by around 55% and, at the same time, replaces the two coats that are normally applied, chromic anodising and the primers currently in use, with a single coating. These coatings usually contain Cr(VI), a substance which will be banned from use as of 2024 in compliance with the European REACH Regulation.
During the M17 monitoring meeting, the most important results were announced for WP3 - the Process development work package, where it was possible to evaluate the anaphoretic process variables for the selection of the final process, and WP4 - the Testing and Validation work package, in which the final validation panels are being developed. Also, as a result of several visits by LVH Coatings to the CIDETEC Surface Engineering centre, it has been possible to start work on WP5 – the Demonstration work package, in which the initial testing of pre-treatment and anaphoretic coating has been carried out on one of the complex geometry prototypes (landing gear component) provided by LIEBHERR-AEROSPACE.