Electroless Nickel: need intro and technical info

A. Hi Billel. Other potential reducing agents are sodium borohydride or dimethylamine borane. These don't produce nickel phosphorous deposits of course.

Maybe a local or university library can get you a good book on electroless nickel plating ⇨

If not, the paper that Ken Vlach suggests below is a start :-)
Luck & Regards,


Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hello Ismael,
In one sentence, electroless nickel is an autocatalytic process that deposits a nickel alloy, usually nickel-phosphorous, in a smooth even layer that is hard, corrosion-resistant, and conductive.

Our list of books includes two books about electroless nickel as well as entries like the Metal Finishing Guidebook, which has an introductory chapter.
"Products Finishing" magazine ran an annual electroless nickel conference for years, from which proceedings are available, and which cover the subject is tremendous detail.
Good luck!

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Macdermid has several pages of technical information on EN coatings. To access: Home page -> Industrial Products -> Products -> Electroless Nickel -> Properties. Engineering, Mechanical and Physical Properties are given.

Heatbath has descriptions of their Nitec® low, medium and high-phosphorus ENs.

Surface Technology, Inc. gives deposit properties of each of their EN products.

The Nickel Development Institute (www.nidi.com) has an informative publication "Properties and Applications of Electroless Nickel" at http://www.nidi.org/multimedia/technical_support/technical_literature_pdfs/10000_technical_series/10081.PDF

A. Dear SIR,

To keep your electroless nickel in good working conditions I suggest the next.

1-avoid over heating
2-adjust pH at 9 with AMM sol.
3-continuous filtration
4-avoid excess reducing agent[hypo phosphite]
5-at the end the working day reduce the PH again to 7 with H2SO4

Make sure that you make double rinsing before E.N bath about your question yes air agitation is very important with best wishes of very stable bath.

A. Hi Rajan,
The answer to your second question is yes, air agitation is required.
The answer to your second question is "only with a robust cleaning, etching, and plating-on-plastics pretreatment process followed by proper electroless nickel process as described by Raafat. But the whole plating on plastic process is a bit difficult to detail in a few paragraphs. I think you'll need to get access to some some books unless you can provide some detail about the steps you are doing.

A. Slowly increase your pH to 5.2-5.4 (w/ammonium hydroxide) and temperature to 90 °C. It should work. If it doesn't, prepare a new bath without lead acetate, which may be added after the bath has started. If it still doesn't work, maybe they gave you the wrong chemicals or they are contaminated. For academic purposes, it may be O.K. but remember this is an old recipe to make-up a new bath. It doesn't tell you what you should replenish and when. Your bath will be very unstable and have a very low turnover life. It will also co-deposit some lead which is a very toxic and regulated metal. Modern and successful plating plants use proprietary formulations that overcome these problems.