Cost-Effective Determination of Organic Additives in Electroplating Solutions

In the paper, we focus on a cost-effective method for a fast determination of organic additives in electroplating baths. The additive concentration in the electroplating solution has a strong effect on the effectiveness and quality of the plating process, therefore it is desirable to have a constant insight into electrochemical conditions in the bath. A possible approach introduces a three electrode electrochemical cell with a rotating cathode. During the measurement procedure, a voltage between the control electrode and the cathode is controlled at a constant rate from zero up to the maximum voltage limit. For that purpose, a voltage controlled current source that enables a potentiostatic mode of operation is used. The anode-cathode voltage, the measurement electrode-cathode voltage and the current through the plating bath are scanned and data is then sent to the supervising LabView software on the personal computer for further calculations