A New Device for the Maximum Electrochemical Thinning of Metal Disks

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Abstract
The following paper deals with a device for the maximum thinning of metallic disk‐shaped specimens. The apparatus described in the present work is an improved version of an earlier device described in a previous paper [V. Bulckaen, Electrochim. Met. 4, 262 (1969)], which was designed for the sole purpose of testing the validity of the technique used. This new device, like the former, is equipped with circular electrodes placed in a horizontal position. The anode, that is to say the specimen, floats and rotates on the cathode. An electrolyte film, fed to the cell through a hole in the center of the cathode, fills the space between the electrodes. The present improvements, of essentially mechanical nature, permit a much more effective geometrical control of the thinning process. The parallelism error between the two surfaces of the thin foil (minimal along the circumferences) is kept, at an appropriate distance from the center, below 2%, even in a radial direction, on areas extensive enough to allow us to obtain very low magnification electron micrographs working by transmission. This is true for specimens of even a few millimeters of thickness provided that they are disk shaped and of a certain diameter. The most appropriate running conditions for the preparation of thin foils of steel are described.

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