Modification of the surface of ABS polymer by swelling operation and its influence on some properties of electroless deposited metal coatings

ABSTRACT One of the widely used plastics for chemical metallisation is acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). It is a strong and flexible plastic, which makes it suitable for the preparation of details with a complex shape and leads to optimum design qualities. Metallised plastics combine the properties of dielectrics and metals, thanks to which they find application in many branches of industry. Before the chemical metallisation of samples, they are subjected to pretreatment, which includes a number of operations. Among them the most important are: etching (surface micro-roughening of the surface) and activation (adsorption of catalytically active metal centres on the surface). Prior to performing the etching operation, the surface of the polymer samples is relatively smooth. In order to increase the roughness of the surface and to facilitate the subsequent operations, an additional operation of “swelling” is included, preceding the etching operation. The influence of the swelling operation on the quality of the final electroless Cu and Ni-P coatings has been studied in the present work. The experimental results show that metal coatings with uniform thickness and good adhesion are obtained.