Effect of Treatment in Copper (II) Electrolyte on the Structure of a Copper/Alumina Nanocomposite

In this work, the influence of the template pretreatment in copper (II) electrolyte on the copper electrodeposition into nanoporous anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) was investigated. The galvanostatic electroplating mode was used. It has been established that the stay of the nanoporous template in weak acid solution containing 0.2M copper sulphate up to 20 minutes has a favourable effect on the homogeneity of pore filling. The formation of thin immersion copper layer between aluminium substrate and alumina layer affects the potential-time dependencies and decrease the adhesion between aluminium and the resulting AAO+Cu nanocomposite. The uniformity of nanoporous template filling is examined by cross-sectional observations by scanning electron microscopy.