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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS
Simple High-Performance Metal-Plating Procedure
for Stereolithographically 3-D-Printed
Waveguide Components
Marco Dionigi, Cristiano Tomassoni, Giuseppe Venanzoni, and Roberto Sorrentino, Life Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— This letter presents a simple and cheap metal-
plating procedure for plastic 3-D printed microwave components.
The devices are built using a Stereolithographic printer and
then metalized by a two-step process consisting in a silver-
painted substrate followed by copper electrodeposition. The
method achieves good adhesion of the metal to the plastic body
and high conductivity. Resonators and X-band filters have been
fabricated and tested, showing excellent performance in terms of
dimensional accuracy and low loss, with quality factors better
than 6500. The technique can be usefully employed for fast and
cheap prototyping of microwave components at least up to the
X-band.
Index Terms— Additive manufacturing (AM), stereolithogra-
phy, waveguide filters.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I N THE recent years Additive Manufacturing (AM),
or 3-D printing, has received increasing attention in many
fields, such as aerospace, bioengineering, and also microwave
and millimeter wave technology. The main advantage of
AM techniques is that a 3-D object, even complex, can be
rapidly fabricated, using a very fast process from the digital
design to the printer. In the earlier adoption, in fact, these tech-
niques were used mainly for rapid prototyping, but nowadays,
with the growing accuracy and refined materials, they can also
be used for the final production of many components.
Many AM technologies are currently available [1], [2], all
of them sharing the same principle, in which a 3-D object
is built by incrementally adding a suitable material, either
plastic or metal, using a layer-by-layer procedure.
Considering plastic deposition, the resin can be solid
(usually a thread which is melted and deposited as in
fused deposition modeling printers), or a liquid, which is
polymerized using a laser beam with a process called
Stereolithoghrapy (SL or SLA). In metal deposition, the laser
beam melts a metal powder which is used to make 3-D
objects [3]. The main drawback of metal deposition is that
printers are very expensive, usually in the range of hundreds
of thousands of dollars.
SLA printing [4] is one of the earliest methods appeared
in the market. In contrast with metal 3-D printing, it is
Manuscript received July 6, 2017; accepted August 9, 2017. (Corresponding
author: Marco Dionigi.)
The authors are with the University of Perugia, 06125 Perugia, Italy (e-mail:
marco.dionigi@unipg.it).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2017.2750090
1531-1309 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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1
cheap and can also be very accurate. The plastic resins
employed are also cheap and offer advantageous features, such
as high mechanical robustness or high temperature resistance,
depending on their formulations [13]. This technique can be
effectively used to make RF components, such as waveguide
filters, and antennas. [5]–[9]. The mechanical accuracy of the
printed devices depends on the thickness of the deposited
layers—which can usually be controlled to some extent with
the print software—and the width of the laser beam. The
orientation of the component during the process also affects
the resulting accuracy.
After the printing phase, SLA-made RF components, such
as filters and couplers, need metallization of at least the inter-
nal surfaces in order to confine and guide the electromagnetic
field. The quality of the metallization affects the response of
the devices in terms of losses and power handling. The metal
deposition should be as smooth as possible and must be thick
enough depending on the operating frequencies. The adhesion
of the metal layer on the plastic must also be considered in
order to avoid peeling phenomena.
Geterud et al. [10] propose a complex metallization proce-
dure, derived from the industrial plating of plastic material.
It uses several steps and many potentially dangerous chemical
products making the method quite expensive and not easy to
implement. On the contrary, Périgaud et al. [7] simply apply
a multilayer silver painting of the surfaces, which appears to
be the simplest method. In between there are methods that
use a dual layer deposition. In [11], a combination of spray
plating and electrolytic deposition was proposed, although the
authors did not address the idea for RF devices. Zhu et al. [12]
grow an electro-less copper substrate covered with an elec-
trolytic copper plating, followed by an antioxidation finishing
bath.
In this letter, a simple and reliable method for the metalliza-
tion of RF components made with an SLA printer is proposed,
based on a combination of silver painting and electrolytic
copper deposition. The method needs a limited number of
steps and can be easily executed in a small laboratory since
it uses easy-to-find materials and low-hazard reagents. The
method leads to a good adhesion of the conductive layer with
the plastic body of the device. Filters and resonators up to
X-band were selected as test structures because of their high
sensitivity to metal conductivity and mechanical tolerances.
Experimental results were highly satisfactory as illustrated
below.
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2 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS
Fig. 1. (a) Silver painted and (b) copper plated X-band third-order filter.
II. SLA M ANUFACTURING AND M ETALLIZATION
In this Section, the fabrication of waveguide components by
an SLA 3-D printing associated with the metal-plating process
is described. The procedure is illustrated at the example of an
X-band third-order bandpass filter.
The first step is the SLA printing process using a Formlabs
Form 2 3-D printer [13] that produces an accurate plastic
object from a digital model. In order to facilitate the deposition
of the silver paint, the structure has been split into halves,
which are then joined together using screws.
The next step is the creation of the metal-plated layer
covering the inner surfaces of the component. The proce-
dure proposed in this letter consists of the deposition of a
conductive paint layer which activates a subsequent copper
electroplating. The final quality of the metal layer depends
both on the current intensity in the electroplating process
and on the conductivity of the preactivated surfaces. A silver
conductive ink combined with the copper electrodeposition
was found to yield an excellent metallization layer.
A commercial silver conductive paint [14] was spread over
the filter inner surfaces by an airbrush. Fig. 1(a) shows the
painted surface of the X-band third-order filter.
Conductivity tests were performed by measuring the resis-
tance between various points on the painted surface using
rounded probe tips in order to avoid the piercing of the
paint layer. A rectangular sample of the painted plastic has
been cut and the dimensions of the conducting area and
section have been measured. By measuring the resistance
between the probes at different distances along the sample
we have obtained a linear regression that gives us the contact
resistance of 0.251  and a resistivity of 35.64 m. Due
to difficulty of measurement of the paint thickness that can
Fig. 2. Waveguide cavity resonator.
range from 10 and 20 μm, a dc conductivity in the range
of 5.7–2.86 × 105 S/m has been calculated for the dried paint.
The electroplating process was performed in a glass con-
tainer filled by commercial acid solution of copper sulfide by
connecting the structure through copper wires to the negative
connector of a dc power supply and a copper rod to the positive
connector. The electrical current should be kept low in order to
obtain a slow copper deposition and to avoid potential surface
defects such as excessive roughness or spikes. A 100-mA
current was found to be a suitable value for obtaining a very
uniform deposition.
We have used a deposition time of 1.5 h to obtain the
copper layer of 20 μm. The resulting X-band filter is shown
in Fig. 1(b). A remarkable adhesion of the copper layer to the
plastic surface was found thanks to the paint solvent which
partially dissolves the plastic underneath. From mechanical
pull-off measurement of the copper substrate, an adhesion
strength between 137 and 206 N/m2 has been measured. It is
interesting to note that the copper layer detached from the
paint underneath, but the paint did not pull-off from the plastic
structure.
III. R ESULTS
Several filtering structures have been designed, manufac-
tured, and measured to test the fabrication process.
As shown in Fig. 2, the first structure was a cavity resonator
in WR-90 waveguide. The sidewalls of the irises have a
slope of 60° in order to make the painting process easier.
The resulting hexagonal cavity is slightly longer than a rec-
tangular one with the same resonant frequency. Electromag-
netic computations showed no significant difference of the
unloaded Q-factors. The resonator is fed through very narrow
irises resulting in a very narrowband and a high external
Q-factor. No compensation for the metal coating thickness
was adopted in the design of the resonator. The measured
frequency response is compared in Fig. 3 with the HFSS
simulation. An excellent agreement between the measured and
simulated responses is observed. The frequency shift between
the measured (10.197 GHz) and simulated (10.207 GHz)
resonant frequencies is only 10 MHz, thus proving the good
mechanical accuracy. Moreover, the unloaded Q-factors asso-
ciated with the experimental and simulated responses are
very close. For the experimental results the unloaded Q-factor
is 6600, whereas for the simulation results, considering copper
conductivity, the unloaded Q-factor is 7600 [15].
From these data, the equivalent conductivity has also
been evaluated. The resonator’s dimensions and the surface
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
DIONIGI et al.: SIMPLE HIGH-PERFORMANCE METAL-PLATING PROCEDURE
Fig. 3. Response of the resonator of Fig. 2. In the inset the simulation was
shifted 10-MHz downward in order to better compare the curves.
Fig. 4. Response of the three-pole cavity filter.
conductivity in the HFSS model were adjusted in such a way
that the simulation matches the experimental results. In this
way, an equivalent metal conductivity of 4.1 × 107 S/m has
been found.
An X-band Chebyshev three-pole filter with a fractional
bandwidth of 2.2% centered at 9.98 GHz was then designed
and manufactured. The photograph of the filter unassembled
is shown in Fig. 1.
In Fig. 4, the filter response computed by HFSS simulation
is compared with the measured results. As can be seen,
an excellent agreement is obtained without any tuning of the
filter. The filter Q-factor has been estimated to be 6400 [16],
and, using the same approach described above, the metal
conductivity has been estimated as 5×107 S/m. The frequency
shift and the change of bandwidth between the simulated and
the measured responses are negligible. These data confirm the
accuracy of the fabrication process and the good electrical
properties of the resulting filter structure.
3
IV. C ONCLUSION
A simple and cheap metal-plating procedure for plastic
stereolithographically printed microwave structures has been
presented. The technique has been applied on waveguide
resonators and filters up to the X-band showing excellent per-
formance in terms of dimensional tolerances and conductivity
of the metal. Q-factors up to the order of 6500 along with a
conductivity higher than 4 × 107 S/m have been found. The
technique lends itself to the fast and cheap prototyping of
microwave components at least up to the X-band.
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