Evaluation of a non-cyanide gold plating process for switch tubes

摘要

Switch tubes are used in nuclear weapon firing sets and are required to be reliable and impervious to gas permeation for many years. To accomplish this, a gold plated coating of approximately 25 microns is required over all metal surfaces on the tube exterior. The gold has historically been plated using gold cyanide plating chemistry. In this work we proposed to replace the cyanide plating bath with an environmentally friendlier sulfite gold plating bath. Low and high pH sulfite plating chemistries were investigated as possible replacements for the cyanide gold plating chemistry. The low pH plating chemistry demonstrated a gold plated coating which met the high purity, grain size, and hardness requirements for switch tubes. The high pH chemistry was rejected primarily because the hardness of the gold plated coatings was too high and exceeded switch tube coating requirements. A problem with nodule formation on the gold plated surface using the low pH chemistry had to be resolved during this evaluation. The nodule formation was postulated to be produced by generation of SO(sub 2) in the low pH bath causing gold to be precipitated out when the sulfite concentration falls below a minimum level. The problem was resolved by maintaining a higher sulfite concentration and providing an active filtration system during plating. In this initial study, there were no major obstacles found when using a sulfite gold bath for switch tube plating, however, further work is needed on bath control and bath life before adopting it as the primary plating chemistry.