Arcing, Popping, & Hydrogen "Explosions" in Plating, Anodizing, & Electropolishing

A. Hi Atul. You should be able to easily estimate the amount of hydrogen generated in the anodize tank from Faraday's Law. I've never attempted calculating the amount of hydrogen chemically generated in pre-treatment tanks though.

If the tanks are ventilated I can't imagine hydrogen accumulating to anything close to its lower explosive limit'; sorry, I've personally never heard of anyone ever employing a hydrogen detector. Luck & Regards,


Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hi Bill.

Never say never, but in a career in electroplating and anodizing going back to 1967, I personally have never heard of any damage or anyone ever hurt due to this hydrogen generation, and many nickel plating installations are 100X - 1000X bigger than yours.

Luck & Regards,


Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hi David. What may be missing is effective corrective action -- you don't want to damage parts, racks, and rectifiers via short circuits like this.

You should add some preventative measure -- perhaps perforated PVC, fiberglass or polypropylene sheets that will prevent a recurrence of the operator bridging the polarities. Fiberglass grating hung vertically should work but it is quite expensive; perhaps the thinnest open-est grating you can find; a very light duty corrosion resistant grating is used in fume scrubbers to hold the "wiffle balls" in pace -- maybe you can try to locate some sheets of it.

For normal operation, your exhaust system is apparently adequate to keep hydrogen concentration below the lower explosive limit.

You dunce! (said good naturedly with smile on face).

On previous occasions your operator bridged the rectifier with a low impedance path. (Very bad practice and sometimes very costly) This causes flashes and crackles and may damage the rectifier. On the latest occasion when you heard the loud report (like a cannon going off) you ignited the gasses being given off by the process but most probably did not bridge the rectifier and did no damage to the rectifier.

Let me guess, the acid was 120 to 130 degrees. The load on the tank was quite large, probably over 1000 amps and your iron content is above 3.4%. You probably developed a pretty good size foam blanket over the top of your bath and your cathodes were only a few inches from the parts you were running. In addition, you had poor connections between the bars on the top of your tank and the cathodes/parts or your polishing technician was loading/unloading parts with the rectifier turned on.

You can do this again in a controlled manner. Put on ear defenders and make sure you are wearing safety glasses (just in case). Warn everyone in the vicinity that there is going to be a LOUD noise. Light a piece of paper and apply the torch paper to the foam blanket. It will detonate with a loud report.

The cure is as simple as the explanation. Your acid is approaching the end of its useful life. Change the acid!

The reason is quite simple. Oxygen is given off at the cathodes and hydrogen at the anodes. These gasses collect in the foam blanket. Oxygen and hydrogen will combine explosively, if there is a spark, producing water. The noise can be quite spectacular.

The explosion is usually quite benign and the only side effects are ringing ears and an increase in the laundry bill.

In the old days before we properly understood how to control the foam my technicians have been known to make paper aeroplanes, light them and launch them into the foam blanket. Of course they end the flight with a spectacular explosion and laughs and guffaws all round. Whilst I frown on the practice I could not help a small inward smile when I caught them at it. Come to think of it they have not done that in a few years now and we have that new kid on tank 2. Mmmm... Naw. I am far too mature for that kind of behaviour. Teehee.

A. David,

I think what happened is that the gas from the anode and cathode were ignited. The oxygen and hydrogen can build on the surface of the tank, especially if the tank has a little grease or oil layer then the "magic bubbles" go off with a most startling effect when an arc ignites them. Tributylphosphate is a good defoamer. Handle with care it has safety issues, like most chemicals.

A. Hey,

Just joking around with the dunce thing. We all did the exploding tank trick at least once. I guess that makes you a graduate too.

The only question left for you to answer is "Was the tank blanketed with foam or otherwise covered when it detonated?"

If the answer is yes to the foam and you had fresh acid then, as Jon Quirt suggested, you probably had oil on the surface of your tank. If your tank is not foaming the gasses dissipate quite quickly. It is only when you get the foam blanket or cover the tank in some way that you could see the problem.

As you have not had this problem in the eight or so years you have been around this process then you probably change your acid in a timely manner or you do not run with big loads on the tanks. We often run for months or even for years without having a "noisy incident". Recently we ran hundreds of large trays without incident but a new operator had a poof on the first part he ran. He was using a slightly different sequence on his procedure and this caused a tiny spark. The result was a very rapid education in flammable gasses and electricity.

I am 99% sure that your operator ignited the gasses. The act of shorting a power supply that can pass 750 amps steady and probably ten times that in a pulse would cause some damage that you would be able to find. A melted rack or a welded spot on a bus bar, that sort of thing. Even then shorting across the bus bars does not tend to cause the detonation that lighting the gasses off does.

? I think the parts balling up and the arcing are not really closely related; and I doubt that your plating shop is very receptive to reducing the load sizes. The hydrogen pops are probably more closely related to your ventilation system and the 'foam blanket' on the tanks than to the size of the load. But please expound a bit more for us if you don't agree. Thanks!

A. We have this problem on our Barrel Plating line (zinc tank). What we found out was we had a bad tumbler in one of our barrels. So we got that fixed and one of our vendors suggested using this smaller scale version of a barrel. So in actuality you have a barrel inside of a barrel, we use this for our smaller parts of course, because you can't fit anything with any size to it inside of these "mini" barrels, and they plate just as well as a part not inside of the "mini" barrel. You also have to watch when that barrel is arcing that is does not cause a hydrogen explosion.

A. Hi Justyna. In the dark ages when I entered this industry, hydrogen pops were a constant occurrence everywhere and no one worried about them at all. Today, at least in the USA, we are far more risk adverse and people worry about starting a fire, splashing an operator with caustic, etc., but at the same time hydrogen explosions have become more of a rarity.

I think the explanation is actually simple. Hydrogen, like all flammable gasses, has a "lower explosive limit" (it's about 4%). It can't/won't explode at a lower concentration than that ... and most plating shops today have more & better ventilation than in the old days. You should have good exhaust ventilation hoods on that electrolytic cleaner, try to minimize any foam layer on the tanks and I think it will end the hydrogen explosions.

Luck & Regards,

A. Ted is right. Electrocleaners used to not be ventilated and people just accepted the small pops that occasionally occurred. New lines nowadays will typically include a hood with a mist eliminator. There is a sweet spot, where you can keep the ventilation flow pretty low and avoid the need for a mist eliminator- just great enough to remove the hydrogen gas, but not so great that it pulls alkaline mist along with it which gunks up the hood. I would think that would probably be around 50 cfm/ft2 and a slot velocity of around 1000 fpm of tank surface area, but that is just an educated guess.

A. Hi Mike. I designed hundreds of plating & anodizing installations in my career and visited & studied probably several thousand, and never heard or saw one required to use explosion proof wiring & fixtures due to hydrogen (although a few did due to use of flammable solvents).

The lower explosive limit for hydrogen is 4%, so, while 'pops' can happen right at the tank surface on non-ventilated tanks or tanks with a lot of foam, it's hard to imagine a significant accumulation of air with 4% hydrogen in it from an anodizing line.

For several years I was "the plating shop guy" for a service firm that did fire investigations for the insurance industry. Virtually every shop fire is caused by electric heaters in polypropylene tanks ... so it bothers me when we are instructed to mis-focus and concentrate on things that have never happened and probably never will, diverting attention from the real & present dangers we should be hammering home ... especially at a time when more and more shops are moving to polypropylene tanks, while being pressured to heating them with electricity :-(

Lots of anodizing tanks have local ventilation, but whether 4180 SCFM is appropriate is hard to say without knowing the surface area of the tanks and other details.

Luck & Regards,