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Changing Times: Where to Find Cleaning Today
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
By Tom Forsythe
Beginning in the 1990s, soldering technology advances, ever-shortening product lifecycles, the global ban on CFC-113, and other technology advances together brought on the era of no-clean soldering. While cleaning never truly disappeared, significant segments of the industry moved away from cleaning, far away.
As recent events have shown, the 1990s were a long time ago and many things have changed. The Internet and e-mail were new then, banks actually had money they would consider lending, and Michael Phelps was entering high school (although I'm sure he was fast even then). Even more has changed in the electronics industry, perhaps best typified by the tremendous increase in handheld device capabilities no longer simply mobile phones while their size decreased remarkably.
This combination of reduced size and increased capability not only provided vastly improved portable communications, but also enhanced nearly every use of sophisticated electronics. Size and weight go down; quality and capabilities improve. As we consumers become more accustomed to this profound connectivity and capability, we also become profoundly disappointed when we're disconnected or when one of our electronic marvels stops working. While reliability has always been a customer requirement, the complex electronics now finding their way into everyday devices have been adding challenges to achieving that reliability. That's where cleaning re-enters the picture.
The good news is that the leading cleaning technology companies throughout the world did not go the way of buggy whip manufacturers. In fact, while major segments of the industry were operating far away from cleaning, cleaning technology was evolving dramatically. The reason for this continued advancement was simple; the cleaning that did take place progressively became more difficult for several reasons.
First, as the assemblies and devices continued to shrink, it became more challenging to reach the soil. Few cleaning materials can clean a soil they do not come into contact with; no surprise there. More critically, the soils themselves were changing quite rapidly. Those no-cleans advanced greatly in their first 10 years of existence, and then lead-free came along, causing more evolution. There literally are hundreds of solder and flux materials around the world that did not exist 10 years ago. Is it unexpected that technology from more than 10 years ago may have challenges with those new soils? Once again, the answer is no.
Of course, materials suppliers were not the only organizations working to enhance performance. Cleaning equipment manufacturers have not let grass grow beneath their feet either. Great strides have been made in many areas: nozzle design and configuration, electrical and control design, footprint, drying, air management, and more.
While there have been many advances, they have gone unnoticed by the broadest sections of the assembly market for one simple reason: at the time, they did not need a cleaning process. But those times are changing.
For those reasons and many others, more sectors of the assembly market are considering cleaning as a value-add for their operations. Why? How can a new process, which requires both capital and consumables, add value? There are two answers: yield and process window.
Yield improvements are free money, 100% gross margin operations. After all, yesterday's scrap was paid for already. While the industry today operates at demonstrably high yields, increasing that number even modestly provides exceptionally short payback periods, prompting new investments in cleaning. Likewise, expanding the process window to allow fewer line stoppages and rework can provide significant savings. While more difficult to measure, expanding the process window to increase overall line efficiency and throughput means real, substantial dollars to most operations.
There is one little glitch in the growing attractiveness of cleaning as a potential value-adding process. Many operations and often entire companies have had little or no experience with specifying, installing, or operating a cleaning line for many years. Often those with the experience are too far into upper management to be of help or are no longer with the organization. So without experience as a guide, where does one begin?
This is where the outstanding technical programs developed by our trade associations, both SMTA and IPC, can come to our rescue. Both organizations have included cleaning consistently as topics in their world-class programs for close to 20 years. There is a wealth of technical papers available in the associations' archives to mine for answers. But what if you are afraid of the dark?
These two organizations have joined forces to bring focus to this emerging challenge. In Rosemont, Ill., October 2829, 2008, a program focusing exclusively on cleaning is being held at the Holiday Inn Crown Plaza near O'Hare airport. It will be two days of technical presentations by world-renowned users and panel discussions with leaders in cleaning equipment and materials, with the single purpose of updating the industry on today's challenges and best practices to solve them.
So, if no-clean may not be clean enough for your operation anymore, I hope to see you in Rosemont.
Tom Forsythe is an SMT Editorial Advisory Board member and VP of communications for SMTA. Contact him at tom_forsythe@kyzen.com. For more information on the conference, view the agenda here or visit www.smta.org and www.ipc.org.