Activation of wood surface by Pd pulsed laser deposition for Ni electroless plating: Effects of wood morphology on coated films

Abstract

Purpose

Different types of wood (ash, oak and beech) have been activated by new activation method. The aim of this work is to study the effect of different types of wood on the physical and chemical properties of Ni/Pd coatings.

Design/methodology/approach

The wood was activated by ablation of the Pd target using pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. Different diagnostic techniques such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), attenuated total reflection (ATR) spectroscopy and energy dispersed X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), in parallel with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used to achieve this goal.

Findings

The XPS technique confirmed that the highest concentration of Pd was found in the Pd/beech sample, which is associated to the texture of the beech wood substrate surface. EDS results confirmed the absence of any contamination related to electroless plating method. It is concluded that the wood morphology and its surface roughness play a conclusive role to obtain different quantity of metal by PLD and electroless plating methods.

Originality/value

Although several works have been performed to study the influence of substrates on the coated metals and away of the traditional methods in activating non-catalytic surface, in this paper, PLD method is used to obtain a good quantity of Pd distributed on the entire surface and inside the porous of the wood. This study could be considered as a step investigation for understanding the role of the wood substrate morphology on the physical and chemical properties of films. To our knowledge, there are no works of combining a coated Ni/Pd by electroless plating and PLD methods on wood.

Citation

Amer, J., Alkhawwam, A. and Jazmati, A.K. (2021), "Activation of wood surface by Pd pulsed laser deposition for Ni electroless plating: Effects of wood morphology on coated films", International Journal of Structural Integrity, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 165-176. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSI-12-2019-0130