Latin America: An Emerging and Growing Market for Thermal Spray

From the mid-90’s until today, the thermal spray (TS) technology has been growing in the Latin American market. The technology has been widely used in corrosion protection and reclamation applications in mining, hydroelectric power plants, fosil-fuel power plants, and oil production facilities. Service shops that pioneered the use of TS technology have grown continuously and have gained enough reputation to spread confidence in the industry. Although the market of corrective maintenance is still reluctant to use TS applications, more and more are the successful cases where the only and most efficient solution has been TS coatings. In the present talk, some of these successful cases will be presented, as service shops want to share their achievements around Latin America. Niche markets will be discussed provided that important state and private investments are under development in many countries in the region, especially in mining, refineries, oil exploitation and power plants. Last but not least, some investigation topics and salient results will be shared from the research centers in the region specifically placed in Brazil, and Mexico.