Why Is Nickel Foam Pre-Treatment Necessary?

Nickel foam is a material that is used to make battery electrodes. The common nickel foam material is made by first conductive polyurethane sponge, then electrodeposition, and finally sintering.
The conductive treatment in the preceding steps generally includes chemical plating, coating conductive gel, and vacuum plating three ways; electrodeposition can be sulfate or sulfamate nickel plating; and the existing sintering process is completed by air sintering polyurethane sponge first, and then reduction sintering under hydrogen reducing atmosphere two steps, in which air sintering polyurethane sponge is oxidation decarbonization treatment at 300 700 °C temperature.

The steps of the method include conductive polyurethane sponge, electrodeposition, and sintering, with the sintering step being direct pyrolytic sintering of the electrodeposited polyurethane foam in a reducing atmosphere, with the reducing atmosphere being ammonia decomposition gas, the reducing temperature being 400-1000°C, the reducing time being 30-60 minutes, and the decomposition gas consumption being 0.4-0.8 L/g (0.4 The ammonia decomposition gas is a mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen with a volume ratio of one to three.
After electrodeposition, the nickel foam-containing polyurethane sponge is directly pyrolyzed and sintered in a hydrogen-reducing atmosphere, where the carbon reacts with hydrogen to produce gaseous hydrocarbons such as CH4, C2H6, and so on. The above gasification process is sufficient to cleanly remove graphite C from the porous body.
It effectively addresses the prior art's shortcomings in the sintering process, such as easy cracking, deformation, and arching, low yield, high energy consumption, and unstable mechanical properties of nickel foam.