Analysing organic additives in plating solutions

A simple and favourably-priced rotating disk electrode from platinum is used for quantitative determination of the additives instead of the normally used multi mode electrode.

Cyclic Voltammetric Stripping (CVS) and Cyclic Pulse Voltammetric Stripping (CPVS) are methods widely used in plating industry for the determination of organic additives in plating solutions.

The method is an indispensable part of production control of many technical coating processes, especially in the production of printed circuit boards.

The quantitative determination of the additives is done indirectly using their influence on the deposition of the main component of the plating solution.

Since determination uses an electrode reaction corresponding to the production process, the activity of the additives and therewith their effectiveness in the plating process is measured directly.

A simple, robust and favorably-priced rotating disk electrode from platinum is used for this type of analysis that is built in the VA Stand instead of the normally used Multi Mode Electrode.

Main applications: a.

Acid copper baths.

b.

Tin-lead baths.

Special calibration techniques are required for the quantification of the different types of additives.

Brighteners are determined by means of the Linear Approximation Technique (LAT) or of the Modified Linear Approximation Technique (MLAT).

For the suppressors the Dilution Titration (DT) is used.

The concentration of the additives can be determined exactly with CVS or CPVS.

The effective concentration of the particular additive in the bath sample is displayed and printed directly in mL additive per L bath solution.

Dosing to the requested concentration can be carried out very precisely.

This guarantees continuous and trouble-free operation of the facility.

The method obtained general acceptance in plating industry especially due to the accuracy of the analytical results.

Other methods, i.e the classic Hull Cell method, do not allow the determination of concentrations but only the assessment of the quality of the deposited metal layer.

A preinstalled method is loaded to run the determination.

The analysis can be started after adaption of a few parameters.

Ready-to-use methods for the most important types of baths of leading bath suppliers worked out in our application laboratory are already shipped with the instrument.

Further applications with the respective methods are made available on the Metrohm website as Application Bulletins and Application Notes.

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