One-Step PRC Surface Pretreatment for Plating Onto Al Alloys
Authors: Radhakrishnan Rajeswaran , Vijapur Santosh Hanamant , Hall Timothy , Inman Maria , Snyder Stephen 
Published: February 2024

Faraday will describe our recent work on the development of a one-step electrochemical surface preparation process to prepare aluminum alloys for direct electrodeposition. Coating on aluminum commonly requires extensive surface pretreatment processes prior to deposition, owing to aluminum’s reactive nature and affinity for oxygen, leading to the formation of an oxide film that negatively affects coating adhesion to the substrate. Therefore, preparing the surface is critical to remove any oils or dirt attached to the surface and to remove the native oxide film to increase coating adhesion. Conventionally these issues are addressed by a continuous sequence of twelve (12) pretreatment process steps to prepare the surface for deposition. Such an extensive number of processing steps requires significant capital investment for a new vendor, increases the probability of errors during the process, is time consuming (lower industrial throughput that ties up equipment), and requires large volumes of hazardous chemicals (Hydrofluoric Acid) that are environmentally unfavorable and introduce cost and safety concerns. Therefore, alternative techniques that do not require such extensive pretreatment processing with similar or better performance to conventional methods are desired.

Faraday has recently developed a simple environmentally benign pretreatment process utilizing our pulse reverse electrofinishing approach that can dramatically reduce the number of procedures and complexities required to prepare the surface for the direct deposition onto Al alloys. A specific application of interest that requires low-cost, simple fabrication technology for the deposition of wear, erosion, corrosion fatigue resistant coatings onto Al is Neutrino Focusing Horns. Neutrino Focusing Horns, required for research on particle accelerators and storage rings, are commonly made of aluminum. These horns must withstand repetitive thermal and magnetic loadings over millions of pulses in a radiation and corrosive environment and the thickness of the inner conductor is minimized to reduce absorption and scattering of secondary particles in the conductor material. Therefore, protection of the focusing horns from erosion, corrosion and fatigue is of critical importance to assure long time reliability. The most successful coating thus far has been an electroless nickel coating with conventional 12 step pretreatment method. The application of this coating, however, is challenging due to the large size of the horn (4 m x 1 m x 1 m), and industrialization is challenging due to the low part volumes, high capitalization and large number of process steps.

This presentation will focus pulse/pulse reverse surface preparation processes being developed by Faraday Technology. It will explore surface pretreatment procedures to simultaneously prepare various Al surfaces such as Al 6061, Al 4043, Al 1100, and Al 5086 and subsequent direct deposition of ZnNi, NiP, or Ni coatings. These coating have since been characterized and compared to baseline electroless NiP coatings for their functional properties. The results of these characterization studies will be discussed in detail.