ECD M.O.L.E.® Thermal Profiling - White Paper

What is J-Standard compliance and why should you care? Is your operation in full compliance? Is your team adopting practices that may be sacrificing compliance? What’s your confidence level that moisture sensitive components have been stored correctly? With the abundance of misleading information, outdated practices, and simple lack of understanding, you may be at risk of unintentionally producing suspect assemblies.

Most electronics professionals know it’s important for parts to be dry before sending them through the soldering process. There are, however, some common misconceptions about drying components and the best way to ensure moisture sensitive devices (MSDs) are ready for soldering.

An often misunderstood concept in reflow soldering is heat flow and how it can influence the temperature of the product being heated. Controlling the reflow oven soldering process requires monitoring not only temperature but also heat flow. Since heat flow is what causes objects to increase in temperature, measuring your oven’s ability to increase the temperature of fixed thermal mass objects will allow you to detect variation in heat flow. By observing the temperature rise in the mass over a fixed amount of time, you can discover if the same amount of heat has been transferred into the mass. Such a measurement, combined with ambient temperature, yields a much more complete assessment of a reflow oven. Only by knowing the heat flow capacity of an oven can you be assured that the oven will heat your circuit boards at the same rate and to the same temperature, every time. This assures maximum yield and quality in the reflow process.

Coming off of a record-breaking year that further validated our approach, ECD continues to maintain our core philosophy of complexity-reducing innovation, which has fueled development of differentiated technology for over half a century.

This article examines application and verification techniques for flux deposition through spray fluxing in wave soldering processes, focusing on through-hole penetration and coverage uniformity. The work evaluates simple methods of spray fluxing verification processes to prevent solder defects and improve product quality.

Classic printed circuit board (PCB) profiling involves connecting thermocouples from your PCB assembly to a data recording profiling instrument and running the assembly through your reflow oven. Profiling has two primary objectives: 1) determining the correct process settings for a given PCB assembly and 2) verifying process consistency to ensure repeatable results. By viewing the actual temperatures (thermal profile) of a PCB while it travels through the reflow oven, once can verify and/or correct oven settings to achieve optimum quality for the finished product.

Reflow soldering is a thermal process which is designed to melt a solder paste (a mixture of solder alloy powder with a solder flux to form a tacky paste) which has been placed on the exposed conductive pads of a circuit board and the contacts or leads of an electronic device to form a solder joint.

This paper presents the results of an initial evaluation study to determine if a printed circuit board’s (PCB’s) profile can be verified by using only 3 thermocouples (T/Cs). Herein, this paper describes two processes: a “characterization” process and a “verification” process.