Abstract
Heat treatment processes for the desorption of hydrogen and thus preventing hydrogen embrittlement from components with electroplated coatings are currently carried out according to empirically determined and partly inaccurate guidelines. Companies usually orient themselves to maximum specified times and temperatures to achieve the greatest possible safety with regard to hydrogen embrittlement potential, but often do not take into account the present coating-substrate system and the component geometry. The results are conservative and often time-consuming and cost-intensive heat treatments. Therefore, heat treatment processes to desorb hydrogen and thus prevent hydrogen embrittlement in components with Zinc and Zinc-Nickel coatings are analyzed using different methods for hydrogen content as well as their effusion behavior. The aim is to develop database-supported software tools that can be used to set specific parameters for optimized degassing heat treatments of electroplated components. Laboratory coating platforms are set up for the different sample geometries, to generate coatings with appropriate pretreatments and well-defined boundary conditions. The test specimens are examined using carrier gas hot extraction (CHE) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS). The analytical methods are adapted to be able to measure the influence of pretreatment, coating parameters, and idle times in air on the hydrogen content in the samples. To account for real boundary conditions appropriate samples are coated at different coating facilities and transferred frozen to the hydrogen laboratory. From the results the difference between the coatings in the laboratory and different industrial environments are analyzed.