A STUDY OF OVERCOMING SOLDER ICICLING AND COPPER WIRE DISSOLUTION IN AN AUTOMATED LEAD-FREE SOLDERING SYSTEM

摘要

Solder icicling and copper dissolution are anything but new phenomena in the soldering industry since the switch from lead to lead-free solder. However, in these common defects there are still industry unknowns in understanding how to correctly plan and execute a Design of Experiment (DoE) to optimize a lead-free process to its full operating potential. In order to increase efficiency and quality of your process and product it is essential that a DoE be conducted when switching from a lead to lead-free alloy. By utilizing common industry solder analysis methods, in conjunction with a robust design of experiments, we have been able to provide three process improvements to a dip soldering application. We were able to show scientific results with data. This allowed us to correlate the results with actual process conditions to bring awareness of how final product quality may change if any of the parameters were increased or decreased from the determined setting.