Intro
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Lesson 08·Selection
Choosing the right treatment
Failure-mode-driven selection. Why 'PVD or nitride?' is the wrong question and 'what's failing?' is the right one.
5 min readLesson 8 of 10
A customer asks: "PVD or nitride?" The right answer starts with another question. "What's failing?"
Treatment selection is failure-mode driven. The wrong way to choose is to pick the most impressive treatment and hope it solves whatever happens. The right way is to identify the dominant failure mode for the application and choose the treatment that addresses that mode. Per the published failure-mode literature in PVD coating research (NCBI PVD review, ScienceDirect cracking-resistance studies), this matching is the single biggest variable in whether a treatment delivers the expected life.