Friction and heat are the two most consistent enemies of high-volume manufacturing. Friction wears out components, slows conveyors, damages finished product, and forces the use of lubricants that create their own downstream problems. Heat, specifically the heat required to cure most high-performance coatings, limits which substrates can be coated and imposes throughput constraints that are difficult to engineer around.
Nanize polysilazane coatings address both directly. The coating produces surfaces with a coefficient of friction lower than Teflon. It cures fully in under 60 seconds at temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius. It contains no PFAS or fluorinated chemistry. These three properties, taken together, open up industrial coating applications that conventional options cannot serve.
Havard Lillebo, CFO and co-founder of Nanize, has raised $140 million across his companies over a career built on identifying technologies with clear commercial cases. The Nanize industrial application set is one he describes with specific enthusiasm: the friction reduction story alone is measurable in defect rates, energy consumption, and component replacement frequency. It is not a theoretical benefit. It shows up in the numbers.
Paul George Savluc, Business Development, Marketing, Software, AI and more. Book a meeting with Paul George Savluc here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-savluc/
Friction as an Operational Cost
In automated manufacturing, every contact point between product and equipment is a site of potential friction-related loss. Conveyors, guides, chutes, grouping equipment, filling stations, labelling machines: in a high-speed line, a product might contact equipment surfaces dozens of times between raw material and finished good. At each contact point, friction creates the possibility of scratching, surface marking, toppling, jamming, and component wear. The standard response is lubrication. Oil or grease applied at contact points reduces friction but introduces food safety risk on food-contact lines, requires cleaning steps before further processing, and attracts particulates that accelerate wear when they work into the contact interface. Lubrication manages friction without removing it. Nanize coatings applied to machine surfaces at contact points reduce friction at the interface without adding a consumable. The coating is covalently bonded to the substrate, meaning it does not transfer to the product moving across it. It is hard, durable, and applied once during a maintenance window rather than maintained on an ongoing schedule. The bottling industry is a concrete example. Bottle lines involve dozens of equipment contact points per bottle per run. Applying Nanize coatings to both the bottle surface and the conveyor and guide surfaces reduces friction at every interface simultaneously. Bottles move more smoothly, jam less frequently, and arrive at each subsequent stage with less surface damage. Motor loads decrease. Component service intervals extend. Defect rates fall. Each of these outcomes is measurable against a pre-coating baseline.Cookware and Bakeware: The PFAS Replacement Problem, Solved in the Factory
The cookware and bakeware industry has used PTFE and PFAS-based non-stick coatings since the 1960s. They perform well. They are also, depending on jurisdiction, heading toward a ban that manufacturers can no longer treat as a future concern. The engineering challenge is specific: find a coating that matches PTFE non-stick performance, survives the mechanical stress of repeated cooking and cleaning cycles, passes FDA compliance for food contact, and integrates into existing production equipment at scale. Most PFAS-free alternatives require trade-offs on at least one of these criteria. Nanize polysilazane formulations are FDA compliant. The non-stick performance comes from extremely low surface energy combined with a dense crosslinked polymer network: oil, water, egg, and sugars do not adhere to the surface the same way they adhere to metal or ceramic. The covalent bond to the substrate prevents peeling and flaking, which is the failure mode that has driven the most consumer and regulatory concern about PTFE coatings. The manufacturing advantage is where the Nanize case becomes most concrete in operational terms. Traditional ceramic non-stick coatings cure at temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius for extended periods. Running high-temperature ovens across a production run of tens of thousands of pans per day carries substantial energy costs and imposes throughput limits based on oven capacity. Nanize cures below 100 degrees Celsius in under 60 seconds. The energy reduction versus high-temperature ceramic curing is up to 90%. The same line capacity coats substantially more product per shift. For manufacturers investing in PFAS-free transition, the capital expenditure case is direct: less oven infrastructure required, lower operating energy cost, and faster throughput from day one. Explore Nanize manufacturing applications at nanize.com/applications/ Full technology detail at nanize.com/our-technology-pfas-free-rapid-curing-polysilazane-coatings-nanize/Paul George Savluc, Business Development, Marketing, Software, AI and more. Book a meeting with Paul George Savluc here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-savluc/