Printed Circuit Board Assembly & PCB Design SMT Electronics Assembly Manufacturing Forum

Printed Circuit Board Assembly & PCB Design Forum

SMT electronics assembly manufacturing forum.


Vibrating reflow

C Miller

#25752

Vibrating reflow | 17 September, 2003

The magnetic thing from the sot23 thread made me think of somthing from the past. Does anyone have any experience with vibrating boards during reflow? I know for a fact that if you vibrate a board during reflow it will alow the parts to "float" and surface tension will perfectly center every part. There was a company that patented some of this process-I think it was BTU-but I never saw any comercial version of it. I was going to try to adapt it my self into one of our ovens but it seemed rather difficult to keep the vibration to the reflow section and not during cool off. I dont think it would be desirable to have the joints vibrating during solidification. I know it works in manual vapor phase but cant think of how it could be adapted to anything on a conveyor. Just curious.

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#25753

Vibrating reflow | 17 September, 2003

As we recall, they attached something like a placement vib head to the rails. The problem, as you stated, was isolating the board from the vibrating rails during cooling of the solder connection.

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CAL

#25754

Vibrating reflow | 17 September, 2003

In addition, I also think it would be detrimental in the double sided reflow process.

Cal

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RDR

#25758

Vibrating reflow | 17 September, 2003

I can guarantee that vibrating ovens will be detrimental in double sided reflow for any of the larger parts. I find it interesting about BTU and there "vibrating" oven. I had a couple of these in the early days and they did indeed vibrate. However, It was probably a design defect and BTU never acknowledged that they did it by design. We used to make jokes about it regarding their "awesome centering capability" unfortunately while the second side didn't have any registration problems we did seem to add a lot of parts to the other side since they fell off.

Russ

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Stephen

#25759

Vibrating reflow | 17 September, 2003

How about a sonic vibrator of some sort? Can't see it working in real life but who knows what someone with too much time on their hands might come up with.

Stephen

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cmiller

#25761

Vibrating reflow | 18 September, 2003

That was the method we were going to try. We have the circuitry from a sifter we make. The sifter works with a regular speaker but I could not find one working at a high enough temp for an oven. Then I lost interest or got busy.

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#25793

Vibrating reflow | 22 September, 2003

I remember reading something about that a while back. The paper said vibration created a higher percentage of voids in solder joints.

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