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US 5,853,557 AGranted
Low friction, ductile, multilayer electrodeposits
AssigneeHandy & Harman
InventorsTheresa R. Souza, Allen E. Molvar
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AssigneeHandy & Harman
InventorsTheresa R. Souza, Allen E. Molvar
Estimating the term…
The present invention relates to composite articles including a surface layer of tin, lead, silver or an alloy thereof that contains co-deposited non-ionic polymeric particles to provide a reduced-friction deposit that has an initially low coefficient of friction and low insertion force and fretting corrosion in separable electronic connectors, and to methods for preparing the plated articles. The polymeric particles have a size between about 0.1 to 0.45 .mu.m in diameter to reduce the coefficient of friction of the resultant deposit to about 0.45 or below. Also, the deposit has excellent electrical properties and can be successfully soldered. The invention also relates to a solution for plating the surface layer of the composite articles, which surface layer reduces insertion force and fretting corrosion of separable electronic connectors.
A method for reducing the force necessary for assembling separable electronic components which comprises providing mating surfaces of the components with a surface layer electrodeposited over at least a portion of the components, said surface layer comprising tin, lead, silver or an alloy thereof and at least about 5 weight percent of co-deposited polymeric particles having a diameter of about 0.1 to 0.45 .mu.m dispersed throughout, wherein the surface layer has a thickness sufficient to provide an initial, relatively lower coefficient of friction to the electrodeposit, but which, after being removed during the assembling of the components or thereafter to expose portions of the components, has a relatively higher coefficient of friction.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.