Modernization of Metal Electroplating with No-Mask Conforming Anodes
Winner Collaborative Team Small Business Category
While people may not pause to consider electroplating, the fact is, today’s world would be impossible without it. Cadmium, Zinc, Gold, Silver, Platinum, Titanium, Chrome; those and many more are integral to our daily lives. Despite a role in every aspect of modern society, the process and technology for metal electroplating has gone largely unchanged for the past 100 years. While safety and environmental hazards have been slightly reduced, electroplating remains a toxic, wasteful, inefficient, time consuming process.
The basic electroplating process consists of taking a base part and carefully mask off any areas needing protection from the plating process, using tape and wax. Then insert it into a metal-containing solution, apply electricity around a metallic anode, and wait. Hours or days later the part is plated.
Time consuming (masking takes hours and requires the best platers in a shop), inefficient (as much as 90% of the electrical power used to plate is wasted), dangerous (plating baths can be incredibly toxic, as is used maskant). There simply has to be a better way.
Working in tandem with CCAD and FRC West engineers, ATC, and CAI Resources, NCMS managed an innovative R&D project that sought to address the cost and environmental issues with a single, powerful solution. The project’s outcome is a completely unique approach. Called No Mask Conforming Anodes, it eliminates the masking step altogether. Each is custom-made to the part it will plate, acid-proof PVC masking is incorporated into the anode itself, which is configured to the specific part shape. This increases speed and uniformity of the metal deposit. Areas not to be plated remain protected and do not electrically communicate with the plating bath. Parts can even be plated outside a tank, with plating fluid pumped through at high speed to realize an optimal metal coat with almost no danger of hydrogen embrittlement, and reduced energy and toxic chemical usage through the elimination of typical in-tank processing facility.
During this three-phase project, the team designed and implemented several no-mask anodes for hard chromium and nickel plated parts. The particular parts were selected based on their volume, long plating cycles, labor-intensive masking and machining, and relatively high reject/rework rates. Additionally, one part, the CH-47 Chinook Rotor Blade Tip, was selected because no repair process existed at all, so damaged parts were discarded and replaced at a cost of $258,000 annually.
By the end of the project, the new tooling developed during the course of the work had been incorporated into the each of the facility’s electroplating operations, with new tooling also provided to Warner Robbins, Aniston, and Cherry Point.
Pilots for these no-mask anodes were conducted at CCAD and FRC Southwest, and the results were nothing short of astonishing:
• 95% reduction in pre-plating part preparation
• 45% reduction in plating time
• 78% reduction in scrap or reject parts
• 50% increase in plating tank capacity, improving overall throughput
• $990,000 in immediate savings from the two most recent pilot parts tested alone
As impressive as these achievements are, one final item must not be forgotten: the technology completely eliminates the mountains of used maskant, which had to be disposed of as hazardous waste so toxic that even brief exposure could lead to serious injury or environmental catastrophe. The overall reduction in hazardous waste at the Depots is enormous.
The team estimates that if No-Mask Conforming Anodes were deployed across the DoD, a savings of over $50,000,000 could result over the next three years alone, with an overall process time improvement of 35-50%, all translating into improved readiness for the warfighter. As a direct result of this CTMA project, Anniston, Cherry Point, Warner Robins and FRC East have been provided production-ready tooling which has generated an additional $7,280,000 savings to date.