[engineerscott]

Has anyone had any success anodizing and dying Aluminum castings? I don't know what alloy we're using at this moment but I can find that out tomorrow. We are considering anodizing some parts (cast aluminimum heatsinks) to improve emissivity for thermal reasons, so aesthetics are not a concern. For best emissivity we would want a micro rough finish and the color would be dark blue or dark green. Counter intuitively, black is not the best color in terms of emissivity as it is not as "black" at the IR wavelenghts that matter at our temperatures. We'd like to do as little post processing after extracting the parts from the mold as possible, but a quick acid bath is probably doable. All of my anodizing experience has been with either extruded aluminum or parts CNC machined from billet. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Scott