Noble metal membrane preparation:Industrial film formation techniques

This report describes in a generic way industrial techniques suitable for formation of (noble) metal films with the aim of preparation of palladium based hydrogen separation membranes on a large scale. Industrial film formation techniques are used in many other industries, like semiconductors, laminated foil industry, metal/plastics industries etc. The aim is finding promising industrial film formation or deposition techniques or routes that can be used for the manufacture of palladium or palladium alloy membranes.

Input for this report is collected from available literature and private communications with several companies that are active in the foil/film production. A list of requirements that has to be met for the palladium/palladium alloy films/foils is cross checked with large scale manufacture techniques.

It was concluded that vacuum techniques, in particular sputtering, are the most versatile and promising techniques for the direct deposition of binary, ternary, multicomponent palladium alloys on porous substrates.