Novel Displacement Plating Process on Aluminum Substrate Enhanced by Fine Particle Peening

To provide simple and convenient way to deposit metallic film onto aluminum substrate, a novel plating process has been proposed based on the manner of displacement plating. In the proposed process, the substrate was treated with fine particle peening (FPP) followed by immersion into electrolyte composing ions to be deposited. The aluminum substrate was immersed into grinding fluid, which was specially designed for ELID (electrolytic in-process dressing) grinding and enriched with copper ion dissolved from grinding wheels, to investigate the displacement plating behaviour. The results implied that FPP enhanced electrochemical redox (reduction and oxidation) reaction at the surface, accelerating copper deposition from the bath. Such mechanism was attempted to adapt typical bath for electroplating. Immersion into the Watt’s bath, commonly used for nickel electroplating successfully resulted in depositing nickel film onto FPP-treated aluminum substrate without applying current.