Hi,

I am trying to etch Pt using a two part etchant from Transene Company Inc
(consisting of ammonium persulphate  and potassium cyanide) which
apparently is a room temperature etchant  according to the website.
However when I do the etching process, nothing seems to be happening to
the samples: I used 50 micron diameter Pt wire (99.99% pure Pt from Alfa
Aesar) and left it in the solution overnight, and there is no apparent
change in wire diameter after more than 12 hours of etch time.

Has anyone run into similar problems? If so, I would be glad if anybody could
help out. I did contact the company's technical support and followed their
suggestions (stirring the solution and warming the solution to 40 C) but
that does not seem to help.


Thank you in advance.

Nirmal Govindaraju

Graduate Student
Materials Science and Engineering
North Carolina State University