Comparison of Some Mechanical and Physical Methods for Measurement of Residual Stresses in Brush-Plated Nickel Hardened Gold and Silver Coatings

Abstract

Hard gold and silver are applied in coating owing to their high hardness, good wear and corrosion resistance for engineering application (e.g. on generators slip rings, sliding contacts and small machine parts) and are typically plated on copper (mostly), brass and bronze. The studied nickel-hardened gold and silver coatings were brush plated on open thin-walled copper ring substrates. Residual stresses in the coatings were calculated from the curvature changes of the substrates. Biaxial intrinsic residual stresses were also determined by nanoindentation testing and by the X-ray technique. The values of the residual stresses represented tensile stresses and when determined by the techniques used they were comparable within a maximum limit of measurement uncertainty. These stresses relax; the dependence of relaxation time was approximated by a linear-fractional function.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ms.22.1.7439

Keywords

• brush-plated coatings, residual stress relaxation, layer growing curvature method, indentation technique, X-ray technique