Marami Metal Plating Offers Electroless Nickel – Plating Service for a Wide Range of Metal Plating Requirements

Electroless Nickel - Plating (ENP) - an autocatalytic chemical technique used to deposit a layer of nickel-phosphorus or nickel-boron alloy on metals - is a leading industrial coating service offered by Marami Metal Plating in Dubai. It is a method where the solution itself acts as an anode, unlike any other electroplating process, and the chemical bath is used to deposit a nickel/ phosphorous layer onto the metallic surface in contact with the plating solution.

Electroless Nickel Plating (ENP) is a functional finish, which is capable of offering several advantages over conventional plating processes to the engineering field. Various advantages of using this technique are: It is incredibly durable and excels in performance in highly corrosive environments, it allows for a uniform deposit build-up on all surfaces, with thorough precision; it enables to plate surfaces of any geometry or intricate shape; it allows to heat-treat the deposit in order to increase the hardness up to 68 Rockwell C; and offers immense cost benefits in the long run.

Speaking about the advantages of this technique, Rajeev Daswani, Managing Director, Marami Metal Plating, said: “With ENP coating, there is no limit to size or shapes as any complicated shapes and sizes of valves and internals can be coated as long as the metal is exposed to the plating solution. Marami leads the way in Electroless Nickel coating of the largest sized valves and components in the region - we offer customised solutions and can build tanks in-house to accommodate non-standard sizes as per client's requirements. So, we can plate really huge valves as well as the smaller parts.”

Unlike other coatings, Electroless nickel-plating can have a very volatile plating bath, thus requiring vast technical know-how to ensure a perfect bond, given its precision and intricacies during coating, few vendors are reputed to carry out such coatings. Those that do successfully carry out this coating are able to satisfy a large requirement, stemming from the need to find a functional coating to withstand highly corrosive environments.

Mr. Daswani, continued: “Another major advantage of ENP is it protects against Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) and chlorides which are prevalent in most oil and gas environments. Higher corrosive environments can put serious pressure on metallic components, which need coatings to withstand. ENP works well to combat such environments as by merely increasing the thickness of the coat, the components can be better protected. Eventually all metallic components will corrode and require repair, however, the idea is to find cost effective solutions that give you the maximum protection.”

ENP's superior quality, its cost effective coating method of application, and the quick turnaround time, makes it more favorable as opposed to other new spraying methods such as the High-Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF) Coatings, which have been often favored in the past, due to high tensile strength. However, the HVOF process which is applied by a robotic spray to build up layers takes more time both to coat and then machine off, and thus is not as cost effective. Studies have recently also disputed that HVOF coatings last significantly longer in corrosive environments to justify the increased costs of the process.

ENP is now gaining popularity in the region and capturing back some of the HVOF markets, especially where specifications can allow the substitution. This is because all benefits offered by the method, along with the fact that compared to HVOF, ENP can deposit highly uniform diamond-composite coatings, which are not restricted to line-of-sight geometries.

Before performing electroless nickel-plating, the material is subjected to removal of old coatings, by machining.  This process not only removes the old coating but also prepares the base material prior to coating.  During this stage all imperfections are removed and damages are filled by precision welding to ensure the surface is clean prior to Plating.   Once the surface is ready to be plated it is cleaned by a series of chemicals. This process, known as the pre-treatment process, is a very important step since failure to remove unwanted 'soils' from the part's surface can result in poor plating.

Lack of proper pre-machining services before has been one of the biggest reasons why ENP, despite its many advantages, was not used or selected by a lot of companies earlier. The unavailability of the complimentary facilities and services, essentially required before the plating, locally meant that a lot of big sized valves could not be machined in a cost effective manner. However, now with a lot of new machining facilities providing these services, the method is regaining popularity.

Because of its high corrosion resistance, low porosity, high surface hardness, and plating evenness the process finds wide scale applications in the petroleum, marine and offshore industry, particularly on ball valves as a barrier against corrosion and erosion. Other typical applications for ENP specifically for oil and gas are packer, tubular goods, valve components - butterflies, balls, gates, cages, plugs, collars, fitting, pumps, rod pumps and boxes, barrels, polish rods, fire tubes, and turbo chargers.