OREANDA-NEWS  On 25 September was announced, that the Board of Directors of the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies approved the financing for the enterprise which will produce metal cutting tools with the nano-structured coatings. The partners of the Corporation in this project are "Saturn" and Gazprombank. The total amount of the financing into the project equals 1 billion rubles, 500 million of which will be backed by the Corporation.

The project will be financed in two stages:

September 2008 till March 2009: project documentation approval, creation and testing of pilot plant.

April 2009 till March 2010: production facility construction, equipment purchase and installation, personnel trainings, production launching.

The production facilities will be located in Rybinsk City in Yaroslavl’ Region at the production site of  "Saturn". The core products to be manufactured by the new plant are carbide-tipped tools for aircraft engine parts processing and engineering industry enterprises. Here “ Saturn” itself will become a large consumer of the products manufactured by the plant providing an off-take of up to 30% of the plant’s annual output. It is planned to supply the rest products to the Russian manufacturers of engineering industry. In future it would be possible to enter the international market.

Currently "Saturn" is the main Russian consumer of a large number of modern tools in connection with the overall modernization of the manufacturing capacities, equipping with the modern muli-function processing centers. According to the existing industry trend tools are a significant part of costs. Since we are the pioneers in our country, we pay significant attention to this project and want to create the up-to-date tool production not only for ourselves, but also for future innovation economy of Russia and primarily for the engineering industry – noted the CEO of  "Saturn" Yuriy Lastochkin.

The key project technology is deposition of the nano-structured coatings onto the tools. The technology was developed by Kurchatov Institute within the framework of the Federal Purpose Program. The project was recommended for financing by the Scientific and Technical Council on the 17th of July 2008.

This project started its way from the Federal Purpose Program, within the framework of which the main pre-production R & D took place. It appears as an ideal string in terms of achieving the objectives set by the government on commercializing the innovation projects - told Leonid Melamed, the CEO of the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies. 

The nano-structured coatings improve the tool wear resistance, which allows processing metals at higher speed and prolongs the useful life time of the tool. It should be noted that improvement of the technical characteristics (hardness, viscosity) of the tools with nano-coatings leads to significant increase in labour productivity and decrease production costs.

The nano-structured coating allows making tool regrinding up to 12 times. As compared to the uncoated tools, nano-structured coatings increase the amount of the metal removed by 2-2.5 times, and increase resistance between regrinding and cutting speed by 1.5-2 times.

The project has high financial efficiency. Project implementation would result in a creation of a competitive enterprise. Besides, creation of nano-coated metal cutting tools production would make a significant contribution into the increase of competitiveness of the Russian engine construction, said Sergey Polikarpov, Managing Director of the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies.