The Electric Contact Performance Of Different Plated Materials

Electric contact largely affects the reliability of electronic equipment. Electrical connectors or connect terminals will result in contact failure even in stillness state after a period of operation. With microanalysis, a very short distant wear track has been found on the electric contact surface and many insulated granules are around the wear track. The phenomena is called as fretting failure, which is common and dangerous contact failure.The purpose of this thesis is to study the electric performance of carbon-plated material and a variety of gold-plated materials by the experiments of fretting, sliding and SO₂ corrosion. Contact resistance and wear rate of contact material are chosen to describe the electric contact performance of different plating. Wear rate is detected by SEM/XES. Wear mechanism and affecting parameters are also discussed and analyzed in the thesis.Contact resistance of carbon-plated material is much higher than that of gold plated materials. Low contact force will result in unstable resistance of C-plated material. Pd underplating can increase the hardness of the gold plated material. However, the wear performance is not as well as other gold plating. Pd can catalyze the generation of fretting polymers, which results in the rising of resistance. Joining P element in the Ni underplating for gold plating can enhance the ductility and bonding of the material. High phosphoric material reveals better anti-corrosion capability and low phosphoric material has better anti-wear performance.