Strip electroplating
Under electroplating of a strip is meant the galvanizing of wires , strapped or punched contacts, as well as semi-finished products .
Strictly speaking, strip electroplating is a special form of rack electroplating. Instead of hanging the materials to be coated on a frame and coating them individually, with this process the workpiece to be coated is pulled through the system as a "tape" and coated directly. It goes through several tanks with different treatment solutions one after the other. Accordingly, the treatment duration in the individual process stages can only be set via the container length or via the number of containers connected one after the other. The number of treatment tanks can be over 50. One advantage of this technology is that very high bandwidths and thus very large areas can be coated with constant quality. Since all parts of the material pass through the same positions in the system with the same speed and dwell time, the coating result is very reproducible and constant. With the appropriate system technology or when the strip is guided accordingly in the system, it is possible to carry out a partial coating, which is used on an industrial scale, for example, when gold-plating plug contacts. All materials available as "tape" can be used as base materials, regardless of whether they are metallic substrates such as steel , copper or aluminum or a plastic film such as polyaniline . In addition to the large production volume, a disadvantage is that when cutting out of the coated material, uncoated cut edges remain at the cut edges.
This process is considered to be very economical, as mass parts can be coated in a short time, partially with precious metal.
Individual evidence
- ^ Friedrich-Wilhelm Bach, Kai Möhwald, Andreas Laarmann, Thomas Wenz: Modern coating processes . John Wiley & Sons, 2006, ISBN 978-3-527-60889-8 , pp. 123 ( limited preview in Google Book search).