Functional Plating

The Zinc-Nickel (ZN-Ni) coating is currently making its way into numerous industries including automotive, and aerospace as a replacement for cadmium due to environmental regulations. With most commercial Zn-Ni baths showing a throwing power that is even worse compared to traditional cadmium cyanide baths, maintaining both minimum layer thickness and alloy composition within specifications represents an additional challenge. 

Elsyca's solutions help manufacturers to ensure uniform current distribution over complex and large parts by facilitating and upfront validating the design of dedicated tooling configurations for optimum final product quality.

Hard chrome is commonly applied in manufacturing industries, especially in machinery for components where wear resistance and hardness are important. Hard chrome plating baths have a very limited plating efficiency resulting in long process times and the plating is often followed by grinding operations where the overplated deposit is grinded down to the target layer thickness.

Elsyca's solutions help to optimize the plating operations by defining optimum rack and tooling configuration to ensure uniform deposit thickness and avoid post-plating operations.

Despite environmental pressure and acceptable substitutes (such as Zn-Ni), cadmium is still widely used in industrial applications such as fasteners, electrical connectors, and aerospace components where long-lasting corrosion protection on complex geometry components is required.

Elsyca's solutions help manufacturers to ensure consistent plating deposits to ultimately avoid operator-dependent post-plating operations but also study cadmium substitutes material to meet new regulations. 

Platinum plating is a key step in the coating process sequence of high pressure turbine blades and vanes. The platinum provides a bond layer between the superalloy base material of the part and the aluminide layer.

Elsyca's solutions help manufacturers to select the best combination of tooling components for advanced control of current density and electrolyte refreshment over the plateable surface of blades and vanes and at the same time reduce material cost by avoiding platinum over-plating. 

Electroplating tin is a very cost-effective process due to its availability and low cost. While a thin layer of Sn on the surface of a metal can inhibit oxidation and extend the life cycle of components, tin also provides low constriction-resistance contact surface and conductive layers. 

Tin creates a proper surface for conducting electrical currents making it useful in the manufacturing of electronic equipments. Additionally, tin is also considered non-toxic and is therefore approved in the foodservice industry.