Influence of the aluminum surface on the final results of a two-step anodizing

1050 Aluminum alloy sheets were used to analyze the influence of a surface treatment on the characteristics of the alumina layer formed in a two-step anodizing. The study was mainly focused on two pretreatment steps, electropolishing and acid etching, as well as on the intermediate stripping step. The pretreatment procedure was optimized by accounting for the chemical nature of the substrate, with the results indicating that additional pretreatment steps enhanced the self-ordered porous arrangement. The E–t curves recorded during the experiments demonstrated that the best alumina layers were obtained when the first barrier layer had a high resistance; i.e., a high anodizing potential. The application time of the stripping step was optimized to clean the surface from alumina remains, without damaging the aluminum substrate. By optimizing all of these experimental conditions, we were able to obtain porous anodic aluminum oxide layers displaying ordered domains several hundreds of nanometers in length.