Non-conductive plating for copper

A. It's called paint. You can't "plate" it if it's non-conductive.

A. This depends a lot on what the characteristics of the coating have to be. Environment? Mechanical abuse? Contact time? Even the dimensions and metrics of the item to be coated has to be considered, as well as the area of the coated surface.

Certainly vitreous enamel comes to mind, but epoxies may work. If there is not a lot of friction or abrasion involved, maybe even a thick stable powder coating? If you don't need huge dielectrics, there are many polymerics which might be applicable as well.

Typical electrical isolation for copper, outside of electronics, is done by placing a physical insulator between contact surfaces. In microelectronics (chips, microcircuits, etc.) intermediate layers of ceramics are deposited between layers of copper, but this is not generally done on mechanical items because of the physical limitations of the thin layers involved.

A. By its nature electroplating indicates that the product to be deposited is conductive. However coating with electrophoretic lacquer should produce a non-conductive surface after curing. I would not know of the insulation qualities of such a coating but it would not be conductive. You need to give more details of the application for the learned people who frequent this forum to better answer your question.

A. Hi Steve. Lots of coatings (not electroplatings though) can be put onto copper to provide electrical insulation without having a large impact on the thermal conductivity. As you probably know, the bulk of the electrical transfer and heat transfer will occur in the bulk of your object, but an insulating coating will stop other things from touching the copper and can stop current flow. Heat flows from the object by conduction, convection, and radiation and it's possible that the coating will have fairly negligible thermal resistance.

If you provide the function of the component and your situation people can probably provide useful suggestions. Good luck.

Regards,