In this section, we will look into the surface treatment and conservation of resources and energy.

Surface-treated products save resources and energy

Before looking into the resource-saving and energy-saving measures in the surface treatment processes, it has been validated that the surface-treated products themselves ultimately save energy and resources.

Let's see the structure of Seto-ohashi Bridge, for example. Using stainless steel known to have excellent antirust properties results in huge building expenses even though the bridge will have superior anticorrosion characteristics. However, without doing so, they have built this bridge to be strong enough and without requiring any maintenance for a long-term (approx. 20 years) by adopting structurally strong HTTS (High Tensile Strength Steel) while applying surface treatments including metallic spraying, hot dipping, and high-grade anticorrosion coatings.

As an example more familiar to us, adopting thinner steel plates has contributed to reducing the weight of automobiles while the industry is trying to make the automobiles more lightweight to improve the fuel efficiency and energy-saving performance. Surface treatments, such as applying zinc plating, zinc alloy plating, or coatings, are used to enhance the anticorrosion properties as well.

In Japan, approximately 100 million tons of steel are produced annually. They are used as industrial materials in varying characteristics to produce a variety of steel products. However, these steel materials will hardly be used as bare iron.Structurally strong steel is extremely prone to rusting. Therefore, surface treatments including hot dipping, electroplating, paint or coating application, and spraying are generally adopted in order to improve anticorrosion properties enough to maintain the functionality of steel products.

As we have seen, we can conclude that the surface treatment process is a powerful technique to promote energy and resource conservation in manufacturing various products.