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COPPER BATHES
COLDSHIELDS
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Electroformed Cold Shields, EMI Shields, Radiation Shields
Optiforms manufactures cold shields; these precision components to your exact material, form factor, and coating specifications to guarantee the thermal performance required in IR Focal Plane Arrays and IR Cameras and many other specific uses.
If your application requires a custom low mass structure which is rugged and lightweight, Optiforms can help design and manufacture it to your exact specifications. We can produce thin walled (0.002) complex form factor components from a variety of materials including Nickel (Ni) and Copper (Cu). We also offer the capability to add a variety of IR reflectance and absorbance coatings required for your specific system performance in our unique coating and plating laboratory.
Electroformed cold shields are typically grown by electroplating on a precision cut "reverse image" master tool or mandrel. These mandrels are produced entirely in house in our machining facility utilizing a vast array of new highly accurate CNC equipment. The resulting part replicates the surface of the master. Production techniques control the wall thicknesses to precise tolerances with ultra-low mass. This results in better cooling characteristics and infrared micro-imaging spectrometer signal-to-noise performance.
This highly technical process typically utilizes a temporary or expendable mandrel designed to match the exact inside dimension desired of the finished part. This is the material onto which the electroformed part will be deposited (usually in Ni or Cu), and it is used as the cathode in the process.
The metal is deposited on the mandrel with exacting process control and tolerances with careful attention to density, stress and crystalline structure which are influenced by the plating solution, pH, temperature and cathode current density.
Once the deposition is complete and the desired thickness is achieved, the entire piece is subject to a chemical reduction that reacts only with the expendable mandrel leaving the "hollow" structure at the end of the process.
These shields are usually coated with specified materials inside Copper Oxide(CuO) and outside Gold(Au) for optimum performance characteristics, rejecting adjacent thermal (IR) noise.
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