Kinetic Modelling of Electroless Nickel–Phosphorus Plating under High Pressure

In electroless nickel–phosphorus plating (ENPP), growth of the plated layer under high pressure was found to be faster than under ambient pressure. To quantitatively elucidate the effect of high pressure on the mechanism of the ENPP reaction, we propose a kinetic model that takes into account both mass transfer and reaction of the chemical species present in the plating solution. We solved the mass balance equations between the chemical species to calculate the transient changes in the thickness of the plated layer as well as the concentrations of the chemical species in the plating solution. By fitting the calculated results to the experimentally acquired results based on the nonlinear least square method, we determined such parameters as the film mass transfer coefficient, the adsorption constants, and the reaction rate constants of the chemical species in the model. As a result, we found that the film mass transfer coefficient under high pressure was greater than that under ambient pressure and revealed the dependence of the coefficient on pressure. The transient changes in the concentrations of the chemical species in the plating solution that we calculated based on the kinetic model employing our estimated parameters closely modeled the experimental results with the determination coefficients being mostly over 99%.