Introduction

Plastic plating is an electroplating process developed with the widespread use of plastics. It can not only save a large amount of metal materials, reduce complicated processing procedures, and reduce the weight of equipment, but also effectively improve the appearance and electrical and thermal properties of plastic parts, and improve its surface mechanical strength. Therefore, it has been increasingly widely used in the electronic industry, national defense scientific research, household appliances and even daily necessities.

Synopsis

With the rapid development of industry, plastic electroplating has become increasingly widely used and has become one of the important means of surface decoration in plastic products. 

At present, electroplating has been widely carried out at home and abroad on plastic surfaces such as ABS, polypropylene (PP), polysulfone, polycarbonate (PC), nylon (PA), phenolic glass fiber reinforced plastics, polystyrene, etc. Among them, ABS plastic plating is the most widely used and has the best plating effect. But usually plastic is a poor conductor of electricity. To be electroplated like metal, its surface must be conductive. 

Therefore, the electroless plating method is often used to attach a metal film to the surface of the plastic, which is called the pre-treatment of the electroplating project. The pre-treatment process is mainly the electroless plating process, and the post-treatment process is mainly the electrolytic plating process.

Main applications of ABS plastic

ABS plastic is widely used in manufacturing fields such as home appliances (such as washing machines), auto parts, building materials, toys, medical equipment, and sporting goods. Its high strength, good electrical insulation and impact resistance make it an ideal engineering plastic. At the same time, ABS is increasingly used in 3D printing to facilitate prototyping.

Electroplating principle

The purpose of plastic plating is to cover the plastic surface with metal, which not only increases the appearance, but also compensates for the shortcomings of plastic, gives it the properties of metal, and gives full play to the characteristics of plastic and metal. But the electroplating process is a closed circuit, and all parts must be conductive.

As we all know, plastic is non-conductive. In order to solve this problem, we need to use chemical plating before electroplating. The purpose of electroless plating is to generate a conductive metal film on the surface of plastic products to create conditions for the electroplating of metal layers on plastic products.

Common coating materials

The ABS electroplated layer and non-electroplated layer have high bonding strength, and most metals can be electroplated, but different metals have different levels of purity and electroplating efficiency. The most common of these are: tin, chromium, nickel, silver, gold and rhodium (Rhodium: a type of platinum, extremely expensive and retains its high brightness for a long time and is resistant to most chemicals and acids.

Most commonly used for products that require extremely high surface gloss, such as trophies and medals), nickel metal cannot be used for plating products that come into contact with the skin because nickel is irritating to the skin and toxic. According to the plating layer, it can be divided into chromium plating, copper plating, cadmium plating, tin plating, zinc plating, etc.

Application of INSIGHT in electroplated plastic testing

There are many factors that affect the quality of plastic electroplating. The electroplating process, operation and plastic technology will have a greater impact on the quality of plastic electroplating. Therefore, the quality control and quality inspection of the electroplated layer are crucial.

The INSIGHT coating analyzer is easy to operate and has flexible configuration, which can easily cope with the challenges brought by the measurement of uneven and irregular plastic coating samples.

The picture below shows the test report of copper-nickel-chromium plating on plastics. It can be seen intuitively that INSIGHT can well solve the problem of the copper layer being unable to be tested due to the nickel layer being too thick and the impact of thin copper-nickel samples due to the penetration of the back coating.