Nickel plated polyimide--where to get?
Phil Hobbs
requires a bunch of nickel plated polyimide film--say 3 to 8 mils thick,
with 40 microinches of electroless nickel on it.
I need to pattern it and then solder to it. Copper is too conductive,
which is a pity, since I already have a roll of polyimide with 1/2 oz Cu
on it.
I haven't found anybody that's interested in supplying it in engineering
quantities (say 10 square feet).
Anyone here have a favourite shop that does nickel plating on plastic?
Thanks
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net
http://electrooptical.net
Robert Baer
> I have a partly-baked idea for improving temperature controllers, but it
> requires a bunch of nickel plated polyimide film--say 3 to 8 mils thick,
> with 40 microinches of electroless nickel on it.
>
> I need to pattern it and then solder to it. Copper is too conductive,
> which is a pity, since I already have a roll of polyimide with 1/2 oz Cu
> on it.
>
> I haven't found anybody that's interested in supplying it in engineering
> quantities (say 10 square feet).
>
> Anyone here have a favourite shop that does nickel plating on plastic?
>
> Thanks
>
> Phil Hobbs
>
can be as good as 1/10 wavelength of light (pick your favorite color).
...another alternate..perhaps gold film?
Glen Walpert
> I have a partly-baked idea for improving temperature controllers, but it
> requires a bunch of nickel plated polyimide film--say 3 to 8 mils thick,
> with 40 microinches of electroless nickel on it.
>
> I need to pattern it and then solder to it. Copper is too conductive,
> which is a pity, since I already have a roll of polyimide with 1/2 oz Cu
> on it.
>
> I haven't found anybody that's interested in supplying it in engineering
> quantities (say 10 square feet).
>
> Anyone here have a favourite shop that does nickel plating on plastic?
>
> Thanks
>
> Phil Hobbs
Not sure about the nickel, but Minco will do custom polyimide film
heaters to your design:
Phil Hobbs
Thanks, I asked them already--they aren't interested in supplying plain
sheets.
I thought about vacuum dep, but it'll get expensive in the sort of
quantity I want, and there's still the adhesion issue. If I still had
my own evaporator, I'd probably do it that way--I could just wrap the PI
round the inside of the bell jar!
Cheers
George Herold
I assume aluminized mylar won't work. I didn't know you could nickle
plate onto plastic? Could you get a local electroplater to put nickel
on aluminized mylar and solder to that?
George H.
William Sommerwerck
Wouldn't it be possible to make the polyimide conductive by rubbing graphite
into its surface ("The Audio Amateur" had at least one article about
home-made electrostatic speakers that showed how to do this with Mylar),
then plate it?
Phil Hobbs
> On Jan 20, 11:32 pm, Phil Hobbs
> <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>> I have a partly-baked idea for improving temperature controllers, but it
>> requires a bunch of nickel plated polyimide film--say 3 to 8 mils thick,
>> with 40 microinches of electroless nickel on it.
>>
>> I need to pattern it and then solder to it. Copper is too conductive,
>> which is a pity, since I already have a roll of polyimide with 1/2 oz Cu
>> on it.
>>
>> I haven't found anybody that's interested in supplying it in engineering
>> quantities (say 10 square feet).
>>
>> Anyone here have a favourite shop that does nickel plating on plastic?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Phil Hobbs
>>
>
> I assume aluminized mylar won't work. I didn't know you could nickle
> plate onto plastic? Could you get a local electroplater to put nickel
> on aluminized mylar and solder to that?
>
> George H.
Thanks.
I'm planning to use it as a really big RTD, so I need a continuous film
of reasonably pure metal with reasonably uniform thickness. The films
have a tendency to crack if the base layer is too thin or too flexible,
which is bad. If I roll it into a cylinder with the metal side in, I'll
put enough of a compressive preload on the nickel to keep it from
cracking under temperature cycling. When the process is better
developed, it might be useful to do the plating on the outside of a
cylinder, so that there'll be a preload when it straightens out.
I'm not sure what temperature the plating is done at, but for lower
temperatures there should be a compressive preload anyway, due to the
differential thermal expansion.
I have a roll of copper-clad polyimide, which is beautiful stuff, in
fact about 250 times too good for this job--the copper is 12 times too
thick and 20 times too conductive. A 40 microinch nickel film is just
the ticket.
Mylar isn't really solderable--it isn't refractive enough. Indium might
work.
Cheers
Phil
Phil Hobbs
I'd be worried about the film adhesion--the nickel would only stick as
well as the graphite. Plating plastic involves stuff like chromic acid
dips, reducing palladium salts to form Pd nucleation sites on the film,
and then electroless plating.
Not your ideal home project unfortunately!
Cheers
Martin Brown
> I have a partly-baked idea for improving temperature controllers, but it
> requires a bunch of nickel plated polyimide film--say 3 to 8 mils thick,
> with 40 microinches of electroless nickel on it.
>
> I need to pattern it and then solder to it. Copper is too conductive,
> which is a pity, since I already have a roll of polyimide with 1/2 oz Cu
> on it.
>
> I haven't found anybody that's interested in supplying it in engineering
> quantities (say 10 square feet).
>
> Anyone here have a favourite shop that does nickel plating on plastic?
You might find your local electroplating shop can do electroless nickel
plating from a physical reducing bath.
Just about DIYable for small quantities if you don't want a very thick
layer. Might even be possible to pattern it with a suitable resist.
http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/std/cppb/metals/metalsrecelectroless.htm
Nickel is one of the metals for which reducing baths work well.
Regards,
Martin Brown
Bill Sloman
<pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
> I have a partly-baked idea for improving temperature controllers, but it
> requires a bunch of nickel plated polyimide film--say 3 to 8 mils thick,
> with 40 microinches of electroless nickel on it.
>
> I need to pattern it and then solder to it. Copper is too conductive,
> which is a pity, since I already have a roll of polyimide with 1/2 oz Cu
> on it.
Could you do electro-etching to thin the copper down until it was
resistive enough? You would need to get down from 12.5 micron of
copper to about 0.03 micron, which would be tricky - since the copper
isn't going to be a uniform 12.5 micron thick layer to start with,
you'd probably end up with a network of isolated islands if you tried
to do it in one hit.
Alternating electro-erosion and electro-polishing might work.
I've been in situations where even a single-atom thick layer of metal
was too conductive for my purposes, but 40 microinches/ 1 micron of
nickel would be a good deal more conductive than that.
--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
William Sommerwerck
news:5d2dnTpQK8jsJaTQ...@supernews.com...
> William Sommerwerck wrote:
>> Wouldn't it be possible to make the polyimide conductive by rubbing
>> graphite into its surface ("The Audio Amateur" had at least one article
>> about home-made electrostatic speakers that showed how to do this
>> with Mylar), then plate it?
> I'd be worried about the film adhesion--the nickel would only stick as
> well as the graphite. Plating plastic involves stuff like chromic acid
> dips, reducing palladium salts to form Pd nucleation sites on the film,
> and then electroless plating.
> Not your ideal home project unfortunately!
Thanks for the clarification.
This is the sort of problem you'd think would have been solved decades ago.
The original SX-70 used copper-coated (plated?) polysulfone, which was then
plated with nickel and chrome. The plating sticks to the plastic with a
tenacity that's almost unbelievable. You actually have to break the plastic
before the plating comes loose.
Phil Hobbs
Oh, it's been solved, all right--Minco advertises nickel film RTDs. I
tried to get them to make the films, but they either couldn't or didn't
want to, and I didn't want to have to deal with making artwork--I'm
going to pattern it with a Sharpie and some ferric chloride. (Ferric
chloride works well on thin sputtered nickel, so I'm hoping the plated
stuff doesn't have some weird passivation. I should try it out on a
bolt or something before I take the plunge. Of course I can also
electropolish it away in KOH solution.)
BTW the Minco rep is a good guy, who gave me a steer to somebody who may
be their supplier--I just haven't heard from them yet.
Anyway, if it works, I'll try licensing it to them. ;) It should be
good for at least 100x reduction in thermal forcing for the down-hole
application I'm working on--sort of the thermal equivalent of a Faraday
shield.
whit3rd
<pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
> I have a partly-baked idea for improving temperature controllers, but it
> requires a bunch of nickel plated polyimide film--say 3 to 8 mils thick,
> with 40 microinches of electroless nickel on it.
So, plate your nickel onto anything you want, then apply/bake the
polyimide as a conformal coating, and etch away the 'anything'
layer?
Phil Hobbs
I'm attempting to throw money at the problem, hopefully in the direction
of somebody who's done it many times before. That way I can get on with
the parts I'm not sure will work!
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Copper is not going to work--you need some reasonable thickness to get
continuity. A pity.
Cheers
Robert Baer
George Herold
A thermal Faraday shield sounds like some sort of distributed heating
(cooling?) Can you mock something up, by soldering together bits of
nickel wire? (I like phosphur bronze for heaters.)
George H.
Phil Hobbs
I don't think I could find a 6-inch long one to begin with.... ;)
Phil Hobbs
I think I can get an improvement of 40 dB or maybe even more in thermal
forcing rejection, but it needs to be something technologically
feasible....and anything involving wire is going to be too conductive.
Sorry to be mysterious about it--if it works I'm certainly going to
patent it. A cheap and simple gizmo that makes an improvement of that
magnitude will be worth actual money, I should hope. It's nice and
discoverable, too, which is another plus, and the actual hardware is
easy to make on standard production equipment. It's getting the blanket
material to play with that's the problem.
It's no secret that the way to get speed in thermal control systems is
to keep everything close together--heat conduction is what's slow.
Michael A. Terrell
Then my roll of metalized film from Sprague won't help you. It came
from their Orlando plant closing, about 20 years ago.
--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.
Robert Baer
reflectance/transmission ratios.
I assume that the conductivity is too much where there *is*
conductivity to begin with.
I am making a wild guess that gold films on mylar are worse for
conductivity even tho thinner films would retain integrity.
So..sounds like you need to find company that can "nickelize" mylar
or kapton, and is willing to do so on a sample basis.
Maybe a pitch to bend them your way.."if you do this sample for me, i
will make you the exclusive contractor for ((fill in reasonable info
without disclosing farm)).
Uwe Hercksen
William Sommerwerck schrieb:
Hello,
it will be possible to get a nickel layer on the polyiimide if you start
galvanic plating with very low currents and the gradually increase it.
But the problem is the poor fixation of the nickel layer to the
polyimide. The normal pcb material uses a special glue for the fixation
of the copper foil to the base material.
Bye
d...@kbrx.com
familiar with the technique, maybe google.
Hul
Phil Hobbs
It isn't that simple to make it stick. Activating the surface needs
chromic acid and stuff like that. I want to throw money at this, not
spend a week reinventing the wheel.
Cheers