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The 30th William Blum Lecture, An Electrochemical Mystery Story: A Scientific Approach to Chromium Plating

Any mechanism of chromium deposition must give reasonable answers to a number of puzzling questions if it is to be successful in accounting for the observations obtained in the plating room. Among those questions are the following: Why is it possible to deposit acceptable coatings from hexavalent chromium solutions, but not from simple solutions of trivalent chromium? Why must additives such as SO4 or F ion be present in the hexavalent chromium bath for the production of bright, hard, adherent chromium films? Why is the chromium plating process so dependent on the ratio of the chromium concentration to that of the additive? What is the role of the SO ion? A mechanism for chromium deposition is proposed which accounts for these observations. The results of certain studies, and the development of the reasoning that led to the creation of a successful mechanism for chromium plating, will be presented.

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