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Loss of Nickel in Nickel Sulfamate Bath

June 27, 2011

Hello everyone,

I am an assistant in chemical engineering working in the lab to deal with daily chemical analysis of the electroplating shops. Last 4 weeks, my colleague and I realised there was a major increase in adding of Nickel Sulfamate into the Hoop plating stock tank. This analysis was done by the standard nickel titration calculation. Thus we added according to the results, and then 4 weeks has past and this lack of nickel continues. This did not happen in the past.

The boric acid was not affected, only nickel concentration was dropping drastically. This issue made my order of nickel sulfamate increase and I feel it's a waste of money.

May I ask what could have happened to the nickel? There is no leak in the tank. =D

Kenneth Choo
Assistant Chemical Engineer - Singapore

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Hi, Kenneth.

The most obvious place the nickel could have gone is onto the parts. Are you sure that you have taken the production rate fully into account? How does the consumption of nickel anodes compare to the past (that's where the nickel is supposed to come from but, believe it or not, people sometimes try to "save" money by running short on nickel anodes, driving up the amount of nickel salts they require). Theft is another possibility.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
June 27, 2011

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In a properly operating process, nickel is deposited from the solution and nickel enters from the anodes to the solution and compensates for the nickel coated on parts.

In your case, you observe a loss of nickel (nickel only, not other components). This means that not enough nickel is entering into the solution, or what we call, the corrosion of the anodes is not good enough. This happens when you use R nickel anodes instead of S nickel anodes.

Sara Michaeli
Tel-Aviv-Yafo, Israel
July 18, 2011

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If anodes were not dissolving properly they should be noticing a considerable pH change but they say nothing about it. In such case chances are someone is trying to self raise his salary by stealing from his patron.
G. Marrufo-Mexico

Guillermo Marrufo
Monterrey, NL, Mexico
July 19, 2011