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In the recent times efforts have been made to combine plastic and metal, and to bring forth a product that has the goodness of both. With metallization the plastic gains the properties like thermal conductivity, strength and hardness. Methods discovered are usually costly, complex and environment unfriendly. Metallization of plastics has opened the door for its use in various fields such as electronic industry, textile industry and automotive industry. Metallic coating are also desirable in providing finish on the items like cell phones and laptop cases. The electric arc spray approach has been used to deposit copper on the acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS). This work makes an extensive study to analyze the factors that are significantly affecting the wear nature of the deposited coating and to obtain an optimal combination of process parameters that results in a coating which adherant enough and has the lowest wear rate.

The present work demonstrates a two-step method to deposit copper over ABS plastic using electric arc thermal spray means. The energy dispersive spectroscopy confirmed the deposition of copper metal. The adhesive strength demonstrates an increasing trend as the stand-off distance increases from 11 to 17 cm, and decreases as the stand-off distance further increases till 23 cm. For surface roughness, porosity and coating thickness, an increasing trend was noticeable as the stand-off distance increases from 11 to 15 cm, and then assumes a decreasing trend till 23 cm of stand-off distance. The surface residual stress demonstrates decreasing course as the stand-off distance increases from 11 to 23 cm. Different factors engaged during the deposition of molten metal droplet on the ABS substrate such as thermal softening, oxide content, particle velocity and cooling rate dictated the characteristic outcome such as adhesive strength, roughness, porosity coating thickness and surface residual stress.

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