This study compares subtractive manufacturing (SM) and additive manufacturing (AM)
techniques in the production of stainless-steel parts with non-stick coatings. While subtractive
manufacturing involves the machining of rolled products, additive manufacturing employs the FFF
(fused filament fabrication) technique with metal filament and sintering. The applied non-stick
coatings are commercially available and are manually sprayed with a spray gun, followed by a curing
process. They are an FEP (fluorinated ethylene propylene)-based coating and a sol–gel ceramic coating.
Key properties such as surface roughness, water droplet sliding angle, adhesion to the substrate and
wear resistance were examined using abrasive blasting techniques. In the additive manufacturing
process, a higher roughness of the samples was detected. In terms of sliding angle, variations were
observed in the FEP-based coatings and no variations were observed in the ceramic coatings, with a
slight increase for FEP in AM. In terms of adhesion to the substrate, the ceramic coatings applied in the
additive process showed a superior behavior to that of subtractive manufacturing. On the other hand,
FEP coatings showed comparable results for both techniques. In the wear resistance test, ceramic
coatings outperformed FEP coatings for both techniques. In summary, additive manufacturing of
non-stick coatings on stainless steel showed remarkable advantages in terms of roughness, adhesion
and wear resistance compared to the conventional manufacturing approach. These results are of
relevance in fields such as medicine, food industry, chemical industry and marine applications.
