[Characterization of Wood Surface Treated with Electroless Copper Plating by Near Infrared Spectroscopy Technology]

Wood electromagnetic shielding material, which was made by treating wood with electroless plating, not only keep the superior characteristics of wood, but also improve the conductivity, thermal conductivity and electromagnetic shielding properties of wood. The emergence of this material opens the way to the value-added exploitation of wood and widens the processing and application field for the electromagnetic shielding material. In order to explore the feasibility of using NIR technology to investigate the properties of wood electromagnetic shielding material, this study analysis the samples before and after copper plated process by the NIR spectroscopy coupled with principal component analysis (PCA). The results showed that (1) there exist significant differences between samples before and after copper plated process both on the spectral shape and absorption, and the great differences can also be seen in the samples with different treat time, especially for the samples with 5 min treat time; (2) after PCA analysis, six clusters from the samples before and after copper plated process were separately distributed in the score plot, and the properties of untreated wood and sensitized wood were similar, and the properties of samples for 25 and 40 min treat time were also similar in order that these samples were close to each other, all of which might suggest that the NIR spectroscopy reflected major feature information about material treatment; (3) After comparing the PCA performance between NIR and visible spectral region, it could be found that the classification performance of samples before and after copper plated process based on the NIR region were better than that based on the visible region, and the information of color on the surface of samples were preferably reflected in the visible region, which could indicate that there are more information about samples' surface characters using the visible spectroscopy coupled with NIR spectroscopy and it is feasible to use visible-NIR technology to investigate the surface characteristics of natural polymers treated with electroless copper plating.