Peak Performance is the very first company to introduce piston rings specifically designed and manufactured for the import automotive market. In the past, racers and automobile enthusiasts were limited in their choice of piston rings. Typically, a piston set is purchased with the "standard" rings. These standard rings typically use a chrome surface treatment. Although chrome performs relatively well. The main benefit of chrome treated rings lies in its extremely low cost. Peak Performance's team of engineers and racers set out to find a compromise between inhibitively expensive and extremely low cost. Our quest has led us to the next evolutionary step in piston ring technology: gas nitride. Gas nitrided piston rings have the benefit of being fairly inexpensive for the amount of protection they provide. Gas nitride excels in areas where a chrome surface piston ring falls short, in particular, in the areas of anti-wear and anti-corrosion properties. Our automotive industry sources have even begun hinting that in the future, OEMs will be using gas nitrided piston rings due to their much greater cost-to-benefit ratio. Don't settle for the standard rings when you can choose Peak Performance Gas Nitride Piston Rings.

For additional information on gas nitriding, please read the following article:

GAS NITRIDING
Along with the change to steel rings for high output engine applications may come another new technology: gas nitriding. Gas nitriding (which should not be confused with the black phosphate coating that is currently used on most rings to prevent rust during shipping and storage) is a heat treatment process that impregnates the surface of the metal with nitrogen to case harden the metal. When used on piston rings, it case hardens the entire surface of the ring to a depth of about .001 inches which greatly improves its resistance to side wear as well as face wear. Gas nitrided rings have a hardness of about 1100 on the Vickers scale which translates into about 68 HRC which is almost 50% more than steel rings and four times that of grey cast iron rings! The rings are so hard that ring wear is virtually nonexistent. In fact, the cylinders will wear out long before the rings will.

To date, the Japanese and some of the Europeans are the only ones using gas nitriding to coat steel rings. There are no domestic production engines that yet use gas nitrided rings.

As mentioned earlier, steel rings have to be coated so they won't scuff, so gas nitriding may someday replace chrome plating as the coating of choice for tomorrow's steel rings.

Roger Borer of Muskegon said domestic manufacturers are looking at the gas nitriding technology but are currently invested in chrome plating. "The future of gas nitriding rings depends on what kind of environmental restrictions the EPA puts on chrome plating. I'd guess that within the next 5 to 10 years, gas nitriding will replace chrome plating. The question then becomes is it more economical to do the gas nitriding in house (as we do chrome plating now) or do we farm it out to an outside vender.

Ring manufacturers have also been tinkering with various combinations of plasma moly and ceramics (such as chromium carbide). Ceramics are extremely hard and wear resistant, but do not conduct heat well. So the amount of ceramic in the mix has to be limited to match the application. Ceramic faced rings have been developed for drag racing applications, and Volvo currently is using a "Moly Cermet" (80% moly/20% chromium carbide ceramic) faced ring in a turbocharged heavy-duty truck engine. But for everyday passenger car applications, gas nitriding appears to have the best chance of being universally accepted.

Surface Treatment Comparison