Plating with Beryllium - guidance please

A. Hi Mark. I hesitate to declare anything impossible because our ascendent technology keeps amazing us. So I'll keep it less dramatic and simply say that, sorry, beryllium is not an electrodepositable medal.

Regards,

A. According to Russian sources beryllium (M.A.Belenkiy, A.F.Ivanov Elektrozashdeniye metalicheskih pokritiy, Moscow 1985) can be electroplated, but only from molten salt or solvent based electrolytes - Hope it helps and good luck!

A. Hi again Mark. Goran is exactly right: beryllium cannot be deposited from aqueous solutions (metal salts dissolved in watery liquids). The basic reason is that any electricity applied will always just reduce hydrogen out of the water in preference to reducing beryllium to a metal.

To obtain electrodeposits of beryllium, even in theory, you would need to either use molten salts (no water) or organic solvents (no water). These solutions are not trivial to implement, as it may require thousands of degrees to melt a beryllium salt; and the fact that beryllium can be theoretically deposited from an organic liquid if water and oxygen can be excluded does not necessarily mean that a practical technology exists to do it. Several other metals suffer the same difficulty, aluminum probably being the most common -- although in the case of aluminum a couple of companies in the world have commercialized electrodeposition from solvents in special tanks which exclude exposure to air. Good luck.

Regards,

Thank you Goran and Ted.

It is always good to know WHY something will not work as hoped rather than simply accepting it as a blind fact.

Beryllium salts seems to require fairly high temperatures to melt, but I might amuse myself for a couple of hours playing with different solvents.

Again, thank you both for helpful information.

Kind Regards
Mark

A. Hi Larry. Sorry, no, you cannot electrodeposit beryllium onto your aluminum tube.

Further, it is not impossible, but is generally difficult to strengthen an object by electroplating onto it. But you probably could electroplate / "electroform" copper, nickel, nickel-cobalt, gold onto the tubing. With an aluminum wall thickness of only 0.0004" you must keep very careful control of the stress. The plating is usually tensilely stressed, but sometimes compressively stressed; with careful control you can keep it close to zero. You might talk to our NiCoForm [a finishing.com supporting advertiser] about this application.

Regards,

Thank you, Ted. If it was easy, it would already have been done. But thought I'd check.

A. This thread has been going a while so it is probably time to point out that beryllium is considered to be highly toxic and should only be handled under strictly controlled conditions. It causes berylliosis,bronchiolitis, pulmonary edema, chemical pneumonitis. and is probably carcinogenic.
It is not suitable for amateur experiments and is generally not available to non professionals.

It is also highly unlikely to be effective in the applications discussed.