Our manufacturing catalogue is centered around copper depositions from sulfuric baths and nickel depositions from sulfamate baths. Copper is important as an electric conductor (and obviously as a thermal conductor as well), because, at normal temperature, it is the second best, while being more inexpensive than silver.

In galvano-forming copper is used for the manufacture of high frequency components, both as deposition and as stand-alone material.

Examples from our catalogue:

• Waveguides
• Launchers, junctions, tapers, arrays, Bragg reflectors, and many more
• Cavities
• Cooled/not-cooled high frequency mirrors

About Silver:
Compared to copper silver is more expensive and happens to be softer. Therefore, it is almost always that only silver depositions are used. Also, the advantage over copper is “only” 10%. Both copper and silver eventually create oxide layers.

About Gold:
If you want to avoid the oxidation of high frequency components gilding might be the answer. Its electric conductivity is about 30% worse than that of silver. And that only counts for pure gold depositions. The gold electrolytes that are in use for the manufacture of conductor plates are complemented with other additives that make the conductivity worse.

GT copper:
The electric conductivity of our copper is slightly above 57 MS/m and comparable to semi-hard furnace copper. Compared to furnace copper, however, our copper is harder and shows a much finer crystalline grain.

For nickel the electric conductivity is secondary. Thermal conductivity is much more important.
Our data was collected from several sources like Wikipedia, old documents or kabelmetall Schladern and publications of the DKI. Our data was conducted by using the foerster probe Sigmatest 2.067.

For questions and suggestions please contact busch@galvano-t.de