Mobile, Non-Drip, Brush Plating and Anodizing Repairs

Brush plating has been used since the 1930s as a way of repairing electroplated components without disassembling, stripping and replating. It is heavily used in the aerospace and defense industry for repairing coatings such as cadmium plate for corrosion control. It has tended to be a crude, messy process, often involving toxic chemicals that drip and run. With the increasing emphasis on environmental and occupational health, and ensuring material and process quality, this type of approach is no longer acceptable.

Corrdesa has modified and brought to large-scale use a non-drip brush plating and anodizing technology developed by Dalic, France. The non-drip process keeps the chemicals in a closed-loop to protect both the operator and the aircraft being repaired. Across aerospace and defense, zinc-nickel chemistries have been developed and qualified for replacement and repair of hazardous, legacy cadmium coatings. This is a key reason why Lockheed have now purchased 50 of these non-drip plating stations for global F-35 ground support equipment. These units are housed in ruggedized, mobile carts, qualified for use on board ship as well as land.

Corrdesa has developed a combination of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational electrodynamics modeling workflows to design custom tooling, as well as computational corrosion analysis to match coating materials to corrosion requirements. With these capabilities the potential for expanding brush plating and anodizing have gone far beyond spot repair of damaged coatings. It is now possible for Corrdesa to design and optimize processes for applying the non-drip plating approach to protect critical areas of very large components, such as spot anodizing of floor repairs for transport aircraft, repair of leading edges and nacelles, and anodizing P-8 static ports for corrosion control.

This talk will present the non-drip plating/anodizing technology, along with a roadmap of future developments.