Investigation and Modelling of Copper Electroforming Process for Surface Roughness Parameters Using Regression and Pareto ANOVA Analyses

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to examine the effect of such deposited copper electroforming process control parameters as the applied voltage, the process time, the filler content, and the copper sulfate concentration on the surface roughness. For this purpose, an electroforming setup was made using a copper sulfate electroforming bath. A full factorial method was used to design the experiments with four control factors, each of them of two levels. After conducting each experiment, the prepared copper electroformed samples were characterized using a contact profilemeter and measuring certain surface roughness parameters, namely, the average roughness, the root mean square roughness, the average maximum height of the profile, and the autocorrelation length. Finally, the regression modelling was used to obtain a predictive model based on the measurements data. Also, the Pareto ANOVA analysis was performed for each surface roughness parameter to evaluate the contribution ratio of the control factors. The results demonstrated that a different control factor is dominant for each surface roughness parameter.