A novel electroless plating of Ni–P–TiO2 nano-composite coatings

✍ Scribed by Weiwei Chen; Wei Gao; Yedong He

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 949 KB
• Volume: 204
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0257-8972
• DOI: 10.1016/j.surfcoat.2010.01.032

✦ Synopsis

A new processing concept has been developed to produce nano-structured metal-matrix composite coatings. This method combines sol-gel and electroless plating techniques to prepare highly dispersive oxide nano-particle reinforced composite coatings. Transparent TiO 2 sol was added into the standard electroless plated Ni-P solution at a controlled rate to produce Ni-P-TiO 2 nano-composite coatings on Mg alloys. The coating was found to have a crystalline structure. The nano-sized TiO 2 particles (∼15 nm) were well dispersed into the Ni-P coating matrix during the co-deposition process. This technique can effectively avoid the agglomeration of nano-particles in the coating matrix. As a result, the microhardness of the composite coatings were significantly increased to ∼1025 HV 200 compared to ∼710 HV 200 of the conventional composite coatings produced with solid particle mixing methods. Correspondingly, the wear resistance of the new composite coatings was also greatly improved.