Reflow Soldering
Why choose nitrogen over air for your reflow soldering process?
Improved brazing quality
Soldering the boards in production under an inert atmosphere improves the wettability of the tin alloy and results in both correct solder joint shape and a reduction in solder joint defects.
Flexibility in setting the oven
The use of lead-free solder pastes imposed by the European RoHS Directive (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) has made the thermal settings of the oven more demanding. The injection of nitrogen into the reflow soldering oven facilitates the adjustment of these thermal parameters by providing greater flexibility of the operating conditions.
Weakly activated solder pastes
Recourse to the purchase of weakly activated solder pastes makes it easier to mount the components on the printed circuits with the use of less aggressive activators contained in small quantities in the soldering flux
Nitrogen supply
To assemble PCB (Printed Circuit Board) prototypes, the inert atmosphere with nitrogen contributes to find the best technical solutions, to correct design errors and to provide a new plan of positioning of the parts on the printed circuit, thus facilitating the work of design engineering services. This step of optimizing the assembly of electronic prototypes opens up simplifications in terms of production steps and working time.
On the other hand, solder pastes must exclusively be combined with inerting with nitrogen. The project to produce electronic boards with weakly activated creams generally begins with an evaluation test on a prototype. Then, in order to obtain validation of the assessment, the methods and quality teams usually carry out a list of various checks related to internal procedures or those imposed by the standards.
In these processes, gaseous nitrogen is required and is delivered either from a liquid nitrogen storage equipped with atmospheric heaters, or from an on-site production solution.
For each customer, the volume of nitrogen required and the type of supply are defined by our teams of experts to achieve the optimal level of performance for your manufacturing activity.
Our expertise and experience at your service
Beyond the simple supply of gas and the technical mastery of the implementation of the gas, our experts accompany you from the design of the optimal solution defined for your reflow soldering process from your specifications to implementation and start-up of your solution.
We train your teams in the use of nitrogen (e.g. safety, handling, etc.) as well as the maintenance of your equipment.
At your request, our experts carry out recurring or one-off audits of your brazing machines to ensure that your installations are operating optimally over time.
They are also at your disposal to advise you if your pcb assembly process were to evolve.
Example of an audit at an international subcontractor
Parameters: machine park made up of 4 reflow ovens / scope of the service: Liquid Air audit of the 4 ovens
Context of the intervention : customer request: optimize the N 2 consumption of the furnaces (residual O 2 content and reduction of flow rates)
Results
25%/year savings on nitrogen consumption thanks to perfect control of the inert atmosphere of the furnaces.
thermally more robust furnaces with more stable residual O 2 contents in the furnaces to ensure better reproducibility of brazing performance.