This article discusses the fundamentals of electroplating processes, including pre-electroplating and surface-preparation processes. It illustrates the four layers of a plating system, namely, top or finish coat, undercoat, strike or flash, and base material layers. The article describes various plating methods, such as pulse electroplating, electroless plating, brush plating, and jet plating. It reviews the types of electrodeposited coatings, including hard coatings and soft coatings. The article also details the materials available for electroplating, including electroplated chromium, electroplated nickel, electroless (autocatalytic) nickel, electroless nickel composite coatings, electroplated gold, and platinum group coatings. These are specifically tailored toward plated coatings for friction, lubrication, and wear technology. The article concludes with a discussion on the common issues encountered with electroplating.

Aluminum components are often plated with other metals to mitigate the effects of corrosion and wear, improve application performance, and extend service life. This article discusses some of the more common aluminum plating processes, including electroplating, immersion plating, and electroless plating, and describes various plating materials and the types of applications in which they are used. It provides critical processing details such as temperatures, ratios, ranges, times, and rates. The article explains how to prepare aluminum components for electroplating, discussing surface roughening, anodizing, and immersion procedures along with expected results.

Lightning damage in polymer composites is manifested by damage at both the macroscopic or visual level and within the material microstructure. This article illustrates the effects of the laboratory-generated lightning strikes on polymeric composites.

This article briefly reviews the analysis methods for spalling of striking tools with emphasis on field tests conducted by A.H. Burn and on the laboratory tests of H.O. McIntire and G.K. Manning and of J.W. Lodge. It focuses on the metallography and fractography of spalling. The macrostructure and microstructure of spall cavities are described, along with some aspects of the numerous specifications for striking/struck tools. The article also describes the availability of spall-resistant metals and the safety aspects of striking/struck tools in railway applications.

This article addresses surface cleaning, finishing, and coating operations that have proven to be effective for molybdenum, tungsten, tantalum, and niobium. It describes standard procedures for abrasive blasting, molten caustic processing, acid cleaning, pickling, and solvent and electrolytic cleaning as well as mechanical grinding and finishing. The article also provides information on common plating and coating methods, including electroplating, anodizing, and oxidation-resistant coatings.

This article describes the characteristics of tools and dies and the causes of their failures. It discusses the failure mechanisms in tool and die materials that are important to nearly all manufacturing processes, but is primarily devoted to failures of tool steels used in cold-working and hot-working applications. It reviews problems introduced during mechanical design, materials selection, machining, heat treating, finish grinding, and tool and die operation. The brittle fracture of rehardened high-speed steels is also considered. Finally, failures due to seams or laps, unconsolidated interiors, and carbide segregation and poor carbide morphology are reviewed with illustrations.

This article discusses failure mechanisms in tool and die materials that are very important to nearly all manufacturing processes. It is primarily devoted to failures of tool steels used in cold working and hot working applications. The processes involved in the analysis of tool and die failures are also covered. In addition, the article focuses on a number of factors that are responsible for tool and die failures, including mechanical design, grade selection, steel quality, machining processes, heat treatment operation, and tool and die setup.

This article provides a detailed account of the various alkaline and acid plating baths used for electrolytic copper plating. Dilute cyanide and Rochelle cyanide baths, high-efficiency sodium and potassium cyanide baths, alkaline noncyanide copper plating baths, and alkaline copper pyrophosphate baths, are discussed. The article reviews acid plating baths such as copper sulfate bath and copper fluoborate bath. It also presents information on the surface preparation considerations, bath composition, and operating variables of copper plating as well as the equipment used.

This article provides non-proprietary and non-competition-sensitive information related to aircraft applications. It presents an overview of reliability and commonly used measurements. Failure modes that cause the negative performance are reviewed based on many types of sources. These include manufacturer service bulletins, reliability and customer service departments, literature reviews, demonstration programs, in-service evaluations, design guides, and surveys of commercial and military aircraft maintenance organizations. The article also describes lessons learned while attempting to avoid overlapping maintainability, reparability, and materials choice.

Aluminum or aluminum alloy products have various types of finishes applied to their surfaces to enhance appearance or improve functional properties. This article discusses the procedures, considerations, and applications of various methods employed in the cleaning, finishing, and coating of aluminum. These include abrasive blast cleaning, barrel finishing, polishing, buffing, satin finishing, chemical cleaning, chemical brightening, electrolytic brightening, chemical etching, alkaline etching, acid etching, chemical conversion coating, electroplating, immersion plating, electroless plating, porcelain enameling, and shot peening.

The structural efficiency of a composite structure is established by its joints and assembly. Adhesive bonding, mechanical fastening, and fusion bonding are three types of joining methods for polymer-matrix composites. This article provides information on surface treatment and the applications of adhesive bonding. It discusses the types of adhesives, namely, epoxy adhesives, epoxy-phenolic adhesives, condensation-reaction PI adhesives, addition-reaction PI adhesives, bismaleimide adhesives, and structural adhesives. The article provides information on fastener selection considerations, including corrosion compatibility, fastener materials and strength, head configurations, importance of clamp-up, interference fit fasteners, lightning strike protection, blind fastening, and sensitivity to hole quality. Types of fusion bonding are presented, namely, thermal welding, friction welding, electromagnetic welding, and polymer-coated material welding.

Mechanical plating is a method for coating ferrous metals, copper alloys, lead, stainless steel, and certain types of castings by tumbling the parts in a mixture of glass beads, metallic dust or powder, promoter or accelerator chemicals, and water. It offers a straightforward alternative method for achieving desired mechanical and galvanic properties with an extremely low risk of hydrogen embrittlement. This article provides a detailed description of the equipment, process steps, process capabilities, applicable parts, specific characteristics, advantages, limitations, post treatments, and waste treatment of mechanical plating.

This article reviews the history of superconductivity from its discovery in the early 1900s to the renewed interest in the mid-1980s spurred by the development of high-temperature superconducting devices. It identifies some of the materials in which superconductivity has been observed, including metals and alloys, compounds, and oxides, and discusses their properties as well as potential applications. The article also explains how various superconducting materials are produced and provides a foundation for understanding the basic operating principles.

X-ray spectroscopy is generally accepted as the most useful ancillary technique that can be added to any scanning electron microscope (SEM), even to the point of being considered a necessity by most operators. While “stand-alone” x-ray detection systems are used less frequently in failure analysis than the more exact instrumentation employed in SEMs, the technology is advancing and is worthy of note due to its capability for nondestructive analysis and application in the field. This article begins with information on the basis of the x-ray signal. This is followed by information on the operating principles and applications of detectors for x-ray spectroscopy, namely energy-dispersive spectrometers, wavelength-dispersive spectrometers, and handheld x-ray fluorescence systems. The processes involved in x-ray analysis in the SEM and handheld x-ray fluorescence analysis are then covered. The article ends with a discussion on the applications of x-ray spectroscopy in failure analysis.

Low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) is a technique for investigating the crystallography of surfaces and overlayers adsorbed on surfaces. This article describes the principles of diffraction from surfaces, and elucidates the method of sample preparation to achieve diffraction patterns. The article describes the limitations of surface sensitive electron diffraction and discusses the applications of LEED with examples.