Electroplating and electroforming facility.
A dedicated plating facility has recently been established within the MMT group with a focus on supporting various MMT and other STFC projects. We provide electroplating for high frequency receiver components with high tolerances and support other surface finishing requirements at RAL.
We are providing electrolytic gold and nickel and electroless gold and nickel plating as well as copper electro-forming. The thicknesses of the various coatings are tightly controlled and verified by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) measurements within our labs.
We are working together with other research groups and universities and our services have been successfully used for gold cone inserts for nuclear fusion research using lasers, miniature micro-machined collimators for space research, detectors for Particle Physics at CERN and specialised components for space qualified cryogenic coolers.
In our plating facility we are currently developing gold plating processes for the internal section of waveguide assemblies and plastic components printed on our high resolution 3D printers.