Metallife-What is it?

Summary

MetaLLife is a proprietary 28 year old surface engineering science that places the sub-surface (.010" to .018") topography of tooling in a highly compressive state. It is not a coating, plating or diffusion process but rather a molecular stress change to the surface of the steel. The induced compression retards and prevents thermal heat checking in Hot work steels such as those commonly used in die casting dies. MetaLLife increases the fatigue failure resistance of other types of Cold work steel tooling, including applications where High Strength Low Alloy (HSLA) steel is used. The compressive benefit is created and derived from impacting the surface with special media in a controlled ambient environment under controlled conditions.

The impaction to the surface causes a kinetic energy transfer that converts destructive tensile stresses to beneficial compressive stress making all types of tooling more resistant to fatigue failures. Tensile stresses are created during EDM, machining, grinding and normal use of tooling.

In the case of die casting dies, because of their inherit lower hardness, there is a micro plastic flow of the base material. This allows MetaLLife to close small thermal fatigue heat check cracking. The beneficial compressive induced process can be done to NEW or USED tooling. The topography change to the surface also aids in buffering cavitation effect. Cavitation effect leads to pitting and breakout of steel surfaces.

Stress inducing surface inclusions and stoned stress risers are removed by the MetaLLife process. The shown compressive texture can be controlled and is inversely proportional to the hardness of the material. H-13 shows more topography due to its relative softness (46-50Rc) as compared to Cold Work steel's hardness of 58-62Rc. For Cold Work steels the topography is only readily evident only by using magnification of the surface.

By offering MetaLLife's 10 process selections, we can fine tune it so it can be applied to all types of steels and hardness. These include all type of hot & cold work steels including: Hot Work (H-13 , P-20, and Maraging) and Cold Work (D2, A2, O2 and others) steels. The process may be applied as often as required or desired with no build up on the tool since only the base metal surface is affected with nothing being deposited to the die's surface. Other benefits are further explained under our Benefits and OEM Benefits sections.