Morphology analysis of nickel-boron/diamond electroless deposition

The influences of mass concentration of nickel chloride hexahydrate, sodium borohydride, ethylenediamine, pH value, bath temperature on deposition rate were studied with orthogonal experiments by a series of pre-treatments on micro-diamond particle, and the optimized parameters were obtained. Both the morphology and the composition of original diamond and the diamond with Ni-B coating were analyzed by SEM and XRD respectively. The SEM image shows that the spherical Ni-B particle is coated upon diamond. XRD pattern shows that the coating compositions are Ni and Ni2B.