Facing today’s demands on components in general industry, aerospace, automotive or medical industry, lightweight and a tailored surface might be the right answer to reduce waste in terms of wear or frictional energy losses. PEO, plasma-electrolytical oxidation, remains as an unknown or at least niche surface technology, giving lightweight metals a hard and robust protection shell. Expiring an increasing interest in the research society in the last decade, it is supposed to be a promising candidate for increasing lightweight potential but being not ready for wide industrial applications by being too expensive or applicable only on small parts or series [1]. The Ultraceramics^® PEO surfaces are on the market for over 20 years, applied under different harsh conditions. The Ultraceramic^® -surfaces can withstand high loading by vibrations giving lightweight alloys like Aluminum or Magnesium a very high corrosion and wear protection [2].

Combining the high wear resistance of the PEO surfaces with polymers like doped PEEK, we can achieve low friction and wear in tribological applications without additional lubricants, leading to sustainable systems. Further improvement can be done using laser radiation for patterning and selective laser sintering of the polymer top coating [4].

Most recently, we found that especially in the case of Aluminum casting alloys an adopted PEO process leads to positive tribological behavior in combination with novel low-viscosity oils. The utilization of Direct interference laser structuring and hybridizing with a solid lubricating polymer manifold the positive effect. A 1000-h tribological test just being finished before this submission proves a very promising solution with low friction and almost no wear after a long period [3].

In this talk we will report on our tribological and corrosion test results within our laboratory accompanied by SEM and EDS findings for different CERANOD surface solutions. These findings we will compare and correlate with some different application cases of our clients, who utilize our solutions on their end products to enable the usage of lightweight metals under harsh tribological, vibrating and /or corrosive environments, and, thus, saving a lot of energy and resources.