Plastic can be produced to fit with various requirements for its high flexibility. In decoration industry, metalized surface is required on a lot of components and have various surface requirements. That means we need to use different treatment solutions to meet with such requirements by the most reliable and economical way. Plastic metalization technique is generally available as follows: Vacuum metalization, plating and nano coating. In this article we’ll briefly introduce the 3 ways for its Cons and Pros and find out which one to use for a specific project.
Vacuum Metalization
A popular way of doing metalization that has a long history. It’s a matured solution and the technology is still improving to fulfill up to date needs. Actually, vacuum metalization is not only compatible with plastic but also working with various materials such as steel, copper, alloy steel etc., we can also apply various materials for metalization such as aluminum, chrome, stainless steel and even gold etc.
The most popular choice of plastic vacuum metalization is aluminum evaporation. Aluminum wire is evapored in vacuum chamber then attached to plastic surface. The most important thing of vacuum metalization is we must spray painting before and after vacuum processing. The first painting is to ensure the contact between plastic and metal layer, the after painting is for varnishing and protection purpose. We can also add color pigment to after painting to produce various colored metal surface. The material we use mostly for painting is UV for it’s high efficiency, we can also use other paint such as ABS or PU according to production requirements.
Plating
Plating on plastic, seriously? Yes! But not on all plastic, mainly on ABS plastic.
The process of plastic plating involves quite complicated process. But generally the technique is about corrosion then plating. ABS is referring to 3 components in its structure – Acrylonitrile, Butadiene and Styrene. The first step is to remove B by chemical way on plastic surface to make it micro crude, then we activate it via Palladium and then apply Nickel. After that we can follow regular metal plating process to complete the metalization.
As we see, the actual plating is no difference comparing to regular metal plating except we have to break the surface structure in order to complete the process successfully. The most important thing is its real plating, means the plastic object is conductive like a metal piece after plating. So if it’s used in electric area, make sure to handle it safely.
Nano Coating
A new method of plastic metalization which has detailed introduction in this article. Nano coating only makes metal like finishing by chemical way but does not have any metal element. So basically it’s just a kind of decoration instead of metalization. It can be used on some items that has not pretty high surface requirements such as crafts and short time use products. Because the surface can be broken easily.
As above introduction, the most durable way is plating because it’s real metal. If we need to use it under bad environment that especially have hardness requirement such as handles, plating is the best choice. If we use it for decoration and have pretty high requirements of surface finishing, vacuum metalization is the right choice. It’s widely used in home products and automotive industry. If we just want a metal like surface without considerring it’s life time, nano coating is the most economical way.
