Metal finishing with ionic liquids: scale-up and pilot plants from IONMET consortium

The authors describe the successful scale-up of five ionic liquid processes by the IONMET consortium. Metal finishing demonstrator technologies have been developed based on ionic liquid systems for the electropolishing of stainless steels and other alloys, galvanic immersion (dip coating) deposition of silver for finishing of printed circuit boards as well as electrolytic deposition of hard chrome coatings, aluminium coatings and barrel plating of Zn-Sn alloys. It is shown that some of these systems can be considered as 'drop-in' replacement technologies for existing aqueous processes that currently require strong inorganic acids and highly toxic reagents.