Jasmine Birtles
Your money-making expert. Financial journalist, TV and radio personality.
Why High-Performance Wear Parts Are Key to Continuous Operations
Moneymagpie Team
8th Oct 2025
You know what they say – ‘buy cheap, buy twice’; and that old chestnut is as true in marine environments as anywhere else.
High-wear parts like bearings, seals, and bushings come in for quite a battering in harsh water-based environments.
Indeed, such components are often subjected to incredible ‘tribological’ (friction, contact) wear, causing stress, fatigue and eventually component failure.
It’s inevitable, then, that low-quality parts fail quickly, leading to maintenance downtimes and lengthy stoppages.
Conversely, today’s high-performance parts, by using novel materials and backed by innovative materials science, can resist wear much longer, helping to reduce downtime and building durability into every aspect of a component.
Below, we examine how high-performance parts achieve greater durability and longevity.
Tight Tolerances
When it comes to marine environments, tolerances are all-important.
That means in parts like propellers, stern tubes, and gears, the distances between them and their housings play a big part in determining how well and for how long they will function.
Misalignment of parts – whether through too loose or too tight a tolerance – leads to all kinds of nasty consequences.
But in general, if your tolerances are out, you will know about it because of unwelcome vibration, noise and excessive thermal expansion, and eventually part failure due to mechanical wear.
Modern high-performance composite-based components give much better alignment, as they can fit snugly with other components and because they aren’t given to thermal expansion (see next section) that plagues cheaper alternatives.
Thermal Expansion
An important aspect of tolerance management is thermal stability.
Nothing will cause a part to wear prematurely and eventually stop working like runaway thermal expansion will.
Big advances have been made here thanks to the development of composite materials.
Innovative materials like carbon fibre, glass fibre, and polymer-matrix composites boast low thermal expansion compared to traditional metal components.
In fact, carbon often possesses near-zero or even negative thermal expansion when fabricated into lengths of fibrous material and fixed in place by a thermosetting resinous substance to cement the fibres in place to ensure their dimensional stability.
Friction Modification
Traditionally, friction management has involved applying lashings of external lubricants like oil and water to moving parts to keep them operating as smoothly as possible.
While external lubricants still have an important role to play in mechanical systems, increasingly, frictionlessness is achieved by exploiting the power of solid lubricants (friction modifiers) built directly into a component.
That means that today, solid friction modifiers like graphite, molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) and PTFE (Teflon) are often baked into components.
These component-based lubricants complement liquid-based lube systems and play an especially important role in transitional and boundary stages for mechanical parts, when the external lubrications aren’t always up to the task.
Conclusion
High-performance parts made from novel materials from a company like Tenmat keep on keeping on, even in the most inhospitable environments.
The ways these materials manage friction, thermal expansion and general wear and tear have been a game-changer, making for components that possess unrivalled durability.
Disclaimer: MoneyMagpie is not a licensed financial advisor and therefore information found here including opinions, commentary, suggestions or strategies are for informational, entertainment or educational purposes only. This should not be considered as financial advice. Anyone thinking of investing should conduct their own due diligence.
Subscribe
Login
0 Comments
