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Hull Cell
A "Hull Cell" is a very small (usually 267 ml) "test" plating tank which offers at least 3 great aids towards trouble-shooting.
1. From a bird'e eye view it is trapezoidal in shape, allowing a test panel to be very close to the anode at one end and very far from the anode at the other end. This will show us what happens at very low and very high current density, which can be great clues to what is right and what is wrong with the plating solution.
2. Using standardized test panels and a sample of plating solution from the plating tank, it allows us to test whether the problem is in the plating solution itself as opposed to the components being plated or something else in the plating tank like a defective rectifier or a stray current.
3. It allows us to see the effect of additions to the Hull Cell before scaling up to the plating tank. A mistake newbies often make is to do additions to the plating tank based on theories of the problem. It is safer and usually smarter to make a test addition to the Hull Cell and see the effect before scaling up.
