Process
Q&A with Michael Feldstein, President and Director of Innovation, Surface Technologies, Inc. Please tell us about Surface Technology’s work in coating non-metallic products and the advanced coatings themselves that have synergistic properties. Surface Technology, Inc. (STI) applies our specialty coatings to customers — parts that are made of metals, alloys, and non-metal materials. Our coatings provide important properties including hardness, wear resistance, high friction, low friction, heat transfer, forensic identification. These properties are especially useful in advanced applications, many of which therefore are components made of unique materials. For example, various aerospace components must be lightweight and withstand unusual conditions. Therefore, they are often made of specialty materials including non-metals. Additional examples include medical, food processing, alternative energy, and robotic components which we routinely coat in our facility.
What does "electroless" mean in terms of these coatings? “Electroless” is a key distinction between our variety of plating and the more generic electroplating form of coating. As the name implies, electroplating is a process that utilizes an electric current and a chemical pass in order to apply a metal coating onto a part. This is very useful in many applications, however it lacks the ability of an electroless plating solution to conform perfectly to even the most complex geometries. So while electroplating may be useful for car bumpers, kitchen faucets, and many other applications where it may be ok for the coating to be thicker on edges and thinner in other areas, the more sophisticated devices on which we apply our coatings require perfect uniformity of thickness of the coating to ensure that the component will operate properly and it's demanding application. Electroless plating uses a more sophisticated chemical formulation where the nickel metal is deposited onto the part by chemical instead of electrical means. This is why it is so uniform. The electroless plating process is also uniquely suitable for the type of composite plating we specialize in where we incorporate fine particles within the plating to provide synergistic properties and higher performance.
What role does this coating technology play in reliability? Reliability is a big factor in why our coatings are so useful to end users including manufacturers and machinists that require reliability and performance. Due to the electroless nature of our technology, the coatings are
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reliable in multiple dimensions. Aside from the uniformity of thickness across even complex geometries, the uniformity of the coating composition is outstanding. For example, the uniformity of fine diamond within the nickel alloy matrix is very evident. These factors allow for consistent performance and extended life of the parts. This is critical to the applications we serve.
Tell us about the other side of the business — the sale of your own in-house chemicals to coating shops. Our company has pioneered these high-end composite electroless nickel coatings since the 1970s. Therefore, it was not possible to purchase the plating chemicals from any of the existing suppliers in the industry. Their products were made for more generic types of coating, and we needed systems where the chemistry was specifically tailored to work optimally with particles for composite plating. STI developed the core method of using surfactants within the plating bath to make these composite coatings reliable. As demand for our composite technology grew over the subsequent decades, and other plating shops wanted to produce our composite coatings, we were able to supply them with the same chemical products we made for our own use. That started a tradition of our company being a unique supplier in the industry where we supply the most advanced electroless nickel solutions as well as service that is based on our first-hand knowledge of how to best run these processes. This is because we know how to do it in the most environmentally advanced way (we are a zero-discharge facility and all of our electricity is produced
