Letter 26105

Need the details of electroless nickel plating steps

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Dear sir,

I am a student.I want to know the detail production process for electroless nickel plating. I have searched through the internet, but I only can find for the process:

1.degreasing 2.etching 3.neutralization 4.catalyzation 5.acceleration 6.electroless nickel deposition

Can you tell me the detail process for each?

karen
student - sham shui po, hong kong

The steps you describe seem to pertain to plating-on-plastic rather than electroless nickel per se. Degreasing means getting the plastic clean, etching means chemically attacking it to give it some "tooth" or "key" so the plating can adhere better -- this is usually done with strong chromic-sulphuric acid. Neutralization simply means deactivating a previously applied chemical to keep its remains from harming a subsequent step. Catalyzation and acceleration are proprietary names for proprietary chemical processes. Other suppliers may give different names to these two (or three) steps, but they revolve around seeding the plastic with paladium and/or tin ions so there is some metal on the surface of the plastic to initiate the catalytic nickel deposition. The "electroless" nickel is actually autocatalytic nickel; the nickel in solution will plate out in the presence of the catalyst, which is paladium initially and nickel later. Good luck.

Are you writing a high school level report, or a doctural thesis, or are you an intern in a chemical business, helping them reverse engineer someone else's development efforts? Obviously the depth of knowledge you require depends on your situation.

Ted Mooney, P.E.  finishing.com Brick, New Jersey

 

There are numerous good books specifically on electroless nickel, so it may be worth looking in a library. There are also many books that cover electroless nickel as a plating process, such as plating on plastics. To help you, another name for electroless nickel is "chemical nickel".

Trevor Crichton R&D practical scientist - UK

Ed. note: Two of those electroless nickel books are Chemical (Electroless) Nickel Plating, by G.G. Gawrilov and Electroless Plating - Fundamentals & Applications by Mallory & Hajdu. A great plating on plastics book is Standards and Guidelines for Electroplated Plastics, from ASEP.

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