How to deposit Stainless Steel on Titanium foil

A. Hi Emily. At the risk of oversimplification, you can't deposit stainless steel onto anything. Two alternatives might be to make the foil out of stainless steel and coat it with titanium via PVD processes, or plate the titanium foil with some other material like nickel or gold, which are not stainless steel but which may offer the properties that you require. Good luck.

Regards,

A. You can also coat SS on Ti by PVD. Long time back I did coat SS on brass by arc process. It would have matte finish and not shining like polished ss.

A. Hi Emily
Ted is right. It is not a practicable proposition to electrodeposit stainless steel.
However, my heart sinks whenever designers request "stainless Steel". There are at least fifty 'standard' stainless steels with widely differing properties. Unless we know what you require of the coating, it is difficult to advise you.
Perhaps all is not lost. Stainless steels owe much of their properties to the presence of chromium and nickel. Either of these is easy to deposit singly. Possibly they would give what you want.
But be advised that plating anything onto titanium requires specialist surface preparation. If this is your first experience of plating, you are starting at the deep end!
Good Luck

A. Actually, you can use a stainless steel target to PVD deposit stainless steel on titanium foil. You might have to arc the stainless to keep it stainless. I'm not sure what you would get with either sputtering or evaporation. Anyway, even though it can be done, you may not find anyone that will do it.

A. Thanks Jim. But another question would be whether it will perform like stainless steel anyway. I think there is more to stainless steel than simply the right proportions of iron, chromiium, and nickel.

Regards,

A. If, as suggested above, the desire is to have a coating that looks like stainless steel, PVD can do the trick. At my former company we PVD-coated titanium orthodontic brackets with sub-stoichiometric (lower nitrogen content) titanium nitride to give them the stainless steel look. Where I work now we have a PVD coating that looks like stainless that is based on chromium nitride. It too can be deposited on titanium.

A. So it is important to know why Emily wants to have titanium on SS. If it is only for 'looks' there can be many solutions. I agree with Ted that an SS coating by PVD may not have all properties same as the bulk SS. This is true for any coating by any method. If one clearly states desired and undesired properties of the coating it would be easier to choose a coating material and a suitable technique.