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Nickel plate on Aluminum

2005

Hello,

Hopefully you can help me out with this.

We are designing hardware to go on a navy ship. Most of this hardware is being constructed from aluminum. In the past designs they have just used electrically conductive chemical conversion on the aluminum but we are now using a new design where we will need abrasion resistance. We came up with a design using an undercoating of zincate and copper followed by electrodeposited nickel .001" thick. This raised a lot of concern about forming galvanic cells even before mating with other materials. My question is have you seen this combination on aluminum before and if so do you know if there were corrosion problems. Also if you have any other suggestions that might work they would be greatly appreciated. The plating needs to be abrasion resistant, corrosion resistant in salt fog atmospheres mated with tin/lead, and stainless steel; also needs to be electrically conductive.

Thanks,

Eric Venghaus
Mechanical Engineer - Tucson, Arizona, USA

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Hi

I'm suggest you to use a electroless boron based nickel solution.
Regards,

Anders Sundman
4th Generation Surface Engineering
Consultant - Arvika,
Sweden
2005

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EN and aluminum is not terrible, but it is not optimal either. For abrasion resistance you are fairly well stuck with EN or chrome. There may be some vapor deposited material that might work, but I do not know which one that might be.
I would personally drop the copper plate and use an alkaline EN for a strike followed by the regular EN. Had great luck with it. Zincate is still required.

James Watts
- Navarre, Florida
2005