Rushford Hypersonic LLC, spun out from the University of Minnesota's Rushford Institute for Nanotechnology (RINTek), is working towards commercializing the Hypersonic Plasma Particle Deposition process for specific high-end coating application needs. This process will provide a variety of coating technologies which are harder, denser, and more fracture resistant and less heat generative than the standard Carbide coatings used in the industrial tooling industry today. The firm uses the Hall-Petch Effect, which states that fracture stress and hardness of a poly crystalline material increases as the grain size decreases, that is generated by the HPPD process to coat and sell industrial tooling, as well as develop coating applications materials that can benefit from the improved hardness and friction reduction that this process offers over standard industrial carbide tooling and other coatings used today in machine tooling and coating applications. There are may other sub-micron sized applications that can utilize these coating technologies that will be further developed in the next phase of commercialization of these processes.
