Cryogenic Thermal Cycling

[moehl]

Has anyone out there had any experience with this process. According to their website, this process reduces friction, micro cracking, can be used on any metals or plastics.
Used for brake rotors and engine components (will make them last forever).
Their website is "Coldfire.com"
Would appreciate any responses

Harley

[Cass]

About the same amount of scam as hair growing lotion for most materials. I spent up lots of government money studying it and doing it on things for defense. Not worth the trouble. The scammers rely on your not being able to easily judge the benefits and having a lot of variables to confuse the issue. "Oh you ran it too hard", Oh the oil you used is wroing, Oh the clearance was off, It vibrated, it chattered, you coughed." We once spend a good bit of money getting some samples coated with "a coating harder than diamond", it looked good but someone washed the parts with hydrogen peroxide and the coating washed off. Might have been good for growing hair but we didn't try it before it went down the drain.

[SGW]

I can't see why it would make any significatn difference. It seems to me that crystalline structural change is going to occur when the atoms are free to move (when the metal is hot), not when it's cooled to minus-a-gazillion=degrees and everything slows down.

I think Cass is right -- it's one of those things that hardly anybody can properly test, outside of a laboratory, but nearly everybody WANTS to believe they notice a difference after dropping $650 on a set of frozen brake rotors.

[Bruce Griffing]

The only grain of truth in this is related to cryogenic processing following heat treatment. If carbon containing steel is quenched from high temperature it will harden due to the formation of martensite (a different phase of the same material). The hardness and amount of martensite depends on many parameters - % carbon and other alloying metals, thermal history, etc. Following the quench with a cryogenic temperature treatment can increase hardness slightly and increase slightly the fraction of the material that is converted to martensite. Other than that, the treatment has no permanent effect.

[Thrud]

All modern steel gage blocks are cryogenic stabilized (twice) by lowering them to Liquid nitrogen temp for several weeks.

A recent article in MMS noted that cryogenic treatment of cutting tools enhances their cutting life. It is generally considered to be an additional quenching process for lack of better explanation.

[This message has been edited by Thrud (edited 09-05-2003).]