Beryllium Electroforming

A. For beryllium and beryllia (BeO), you can talk to Brush-Wellman in this country. Both are "toxic" in particulate form (~5 µm particle size) to about 1% of the general populace (I got this tidbit from Brush-Wellman years ago; let me know if I remembered it correctly).

In any event, I used to work w/ BeO making thin film TaN resistors. I doubt if there is a wet chemical process to produce cladding but there are hi vac processes to do this. Some of these include MBE, sputtering and vac. evaporation. For thickness building, sputtering will be your best bet. Remember, once a Be target goes into a vacuum deposition system and is used, extreme caution is needed any time the system is opened, cleaned, or refurbished. In addition, there may be regulations regarding vacuum exhaust scrubbing of your pumping system on the outlet side to insure no particulate is emitted from the vacuum exhaust port.

A. Bulk Be is normally prepared by reducing BeCl₃ with Mg metal. It may be possible to plate out Be from a molten salt, like BeF with NaF, etc. Many metals unplateable via aqueous processes are plateable via molten salt processes. Of course your base material must be able to withstand the temperature. Regards,

I have now been contacted by several folks that are willing or have experience in depositing Be. We are working with a company to evaluate the feasibility of our project. Thanks for all your help.

A. Hi Ian. We appended your inquiry to a thread on the subject. Sorry, beyond what is here, I don't know the feasibility of electroforming with beryllium. But I doubt that there is any lower limit on thickness for other commonly electroformed metals like copper, nickel, and gold. PVD stands for physical vapor deposition.