Efficient Calculation of Current Flow in Electroplating Cells

Until recently, analytic and numerical techniques have not been available for analyzing electroplating cells. Even after the work of Newman and coworkers,1 only restricted geometries were practical. Design of new electroplating systems has therefore necessarily been done by educated guess, rule of thumb, extrapolation from previous systems, and expensive experimentation. Although the physical and chemical processes taking place in a real-life electroplating cell are generously complex and nonlinear, realistic mathematical models can be constructed, and it is within the state of the computing art to solve these models efficiently. This paper describes a computer program to solve the mathematical models describing a wide variety of electroplating cells. An important consideration during this development has been that the resulting computer program be able to analyze many different cell geometries and flow patterns with at most trivial program changes. A second consideration has been that the program be efficient and inexpensive 169