I am going to apply a thin layer of Nickel on an open-pore porous plastic material (40*40*40mm) and want to know what are the chemicals and their amounts.
Any piece of advice is appreciated.
Regards,
I think you will struggle. You do not state the 'plastic' material but metals and plastics are normally incompatible from a chemistry perspective. You'll probably need some form or intermediate layer or surface treatment in order to adhere the Ni film to the plastic. The best routes would be to evaporate or sputter the Ni material. I don't believe that there would be many feasible chemical routes and would be interested too if someone has one that provides stable, strongly adhering Ni-polymer bonds.
As Alan mentioned the metal plating of polymers can be tricky. The first thing you need to know is what kind of "plastic" you have. In most cases you will need a pretreatment: by oxidizing liquids, plasma, UV, ozone .... There is quite some literature on this subject. Some small overview I made about our activities in the field can be found here: https://www.kunststoffe.de/en/journal/archive/article/surface-pretreatment-better-metal-bonding-590964.html?cc.dlstate=true&d=1472132650346 (I can send a copy if you do not have access.)
The actual electroless plating can be done with standard chemicals which are available commercially and with standard procedure which slightly differ from one supplier to the other.
With a good pretreatment the bonding can be very strong. Peeling the metal after electrolytic deposition of a thicker layer will result in a cohesive failor of the polymer.
Dear Alan and Andreas,
Thanks a lot for your help.
Alan:
You are right. Spattering can give us more options regarding the coating layer, but is an expensive procedure, especially if you have different topologies and several test specimen.
By the way, one can use electroless plating to coat a plastic component (kind of plastic matters) with copper, gold, nickel and so forth and some pre-coating processes is required.
Andreas:
The material is an acrylic compound called VEROCYAN RGD841 from Stratasys corporation. Specimens are made through multiget 3D printing.
I am going to nickel plate the specimens and then etch out the polymer to have a shell structure. Thus, I think some pre-treatment procedures that are necessary for having a good plastic-coating bond are not required for my work. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Also I need to know the amount of chemicals for an electroless nickel plating bath.
My best regards
Well, I am affraid you might be wrong! The elctroless nickel plating is based on a surface initiated/ catalyzed reduction of nickel ions. If you just put the "plastic" in the plating baths as you do with metals you will not get a deposition in most cases.
regarding the chemicals: For the electroless plating of polymers you need several baths (Mainly a Pd solution/ dispersion and a Ni salt solution, but also some HCl). There will be local dealers probably also in California. Look for e.g. Atotech or MacDermid-Enthone but there are also minor suppliers. It is not worth the time trying your own mix.
Thanks a bunch Andreas for your prompt and detailed answer.
I think, as you mentioned, it's better to buy a kit rather than mixing different chemicals together, especially in my case that have no experience with it.
Also, I found that acrylics are hard to coat in electroless plating. So, I think it may be possible to apply layers of graphite, by immersing it in a bath of graphite emulsion and drying it and repeating this process for 2 or 3 times, as a conductor layer to escape electroless plating. Something like investment casting. It's the B plan by now.
Please let me know how you think about it.
My best regards
I am not sure if your plan B will work. It comes down to the same problem: you will have to convince the graphite to "stick" on the polymer surface.
Hello, (sorry for the delay ;) ) you can make an acid attack on your polymer to increase its porosity (many time before it was possible to use chromic acid but now it is different!!). After that, for the application of an electroless nickel coating you can immerse the part in a paladium catalyst solution then in the EN bath. In case of an electrolytic solution, the use of graphite is possible as proposed before.
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