Electroplating Profile - pt.4
Reprint from an article in Product Finishing Magazine, July 2002 issue Profile of Professional Plating By Beverly Graves, editor Subsequently, Mr. Ingalls decided to develop his own software package that would be tailored exactly to the unique needs of ProPlate's® electroplating processes. "We wrote our own software. It's unsophisticated but completely effective. Software generally has become so complicated. It seems commercial software developers have a natural incentive to continuously innovate and add features. As the computing power of hardware grows, it facilitates the growth of the software. I personally have a need for only a fraction of the features contained in the word processor or spreadsheet that I use. So we went back to basics with our bath maintenance software, writing it in our spare time. It's based on the Access database from Microsoft. The beauty of developing your own program is the complete flexibility and control you have over what it will do for you. As our process understanding grows, we constantly find opportunities to save chemical maintenance labor. Our maintenance system currently tracks about 550 chemical parameters. Each parameter is control charted and automatically reviewed each day for trends toward a control limit. Four years ago our internal rework rate was averaging about 15% of production, now it is less than 2%. I believe that is a result of improved bath maintenance." For example, if we electroplate gold beyond a customer's specified thickness, we're wasting precious metal and likely producing a defective part. We control gold thickness in part be controlling gold concentration in the bath. That concentration is continuously dropping as product is being plated. But it's not dropping at a continuous and predictable rate. The rate is variable and is controlled by many factors, such as part size, bath pH, power settings and a host of other factors. So all of these factors are continuously monitored and digested by the software in order to determine exactly when gold needs to be replenished into the bath. |