The process of plating plastics involves a number of steps designed to provide a protective and decorative effect by coating the surface of a plastic product with a metallic film, while also reducing the weight of the product and improving its appearance and performance.
Author: Anna
The process of plating plastics involves a number of steps designed to provide a protective and decorative effect by coating the surface of a plastic product with a metallic film, while also reducing the weight of the product and improving its appearance and performance.
The following are the main processes involved in plating plastics:
Cleaning and Pretreatment: Firstly, it is necessary to remove dirt, fingerprints, oils, etc. from the surface of the plastic products, which is usually treated with alkaline or acidic degreasing agents to reduce the surface tension and give it hydrophilicity.
Surface Adjustment: As the high temperature immersion in the decontamination process may lead to the formation of surface bubbles, affecting the effect of the roughing treatment, surface adjustment is required, and sulfuric acid solution is commonly used for immersion.
Roughening treatment: this is an extremely important step in plastic plating, the purpose is to increase the adhesion between the metal plating layer and the plastic. Through high-pressure sand blasting or chemical methods to make the surface of the plastic to form fine pits, increase the surface area and improve the bonding force.
Sensitization and activation: Sensitization treatment is to adsorb the reducing agent on the surface of the plastic, commonly used tin compounds; activation treatment is to adsorb the catalytic substance on the sensitized surface to form the metal seed for subsequent plating.
Chemical Plating: Deposits a thin metal film on the surface of the plastic, usually copper or nickel is deposited first to increase electrical conductivity for subsequent plating.
Electroplating: A thicker metal film is deposited on top of the chemical coating using electrolytic principles to achieve the desired thickness and luster.
Throughout the process, care needs to be taken when designing plastic parts to avoid too many sharp edges, grooves and protrusions to ensure uniformity and bonding of the plating. In addition, the surface of the molded part should have a certain degree of roughness for better adhesion of the coating.