Replacement for nitrogen in the reflow oven

Hi,

This would be a very exciting idea. Nitrogen is an inert gas, so this is why it's used, however Hydrogen mixed with oxygen in normal air is highly explosive, so it would be one of the worst gasses to use in a reflow oven I would think. Remember the Hindenburg!

Nitrogen is one of many inert gasses, and if you look at a periodical table you can see all the inert gasses in a column under Nitrogen. It's been a long time since high school chem. class though.

However Nitrogen is about 78% of the atmosphere (I think that percentage is close) so it's a very easy gas to get, because most of the air you breath is Nitrogen. So it's really going to be the lowest cost inert gas you can get.

Are you getting it bottled, or are you using a nitrogen generator?

Regards,

Grant Blackmagic Design

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call me picky but doesn't hydrogen combust? maybe soemthing you could do is look at your process and your products and decide if you actually need to run in N2. Yes ok I can hear the crys now but seriously, for the vast majority of things if you have good process control and obviously you do!? then selecting a good paste that runs in air, and there are a few, would let you switch it off. Now I agree that there are products where you really want it there and yes it will open your process window but time to think about cost vs return. The other thing is to look at the ppm levels yoru chasing, soem say 50ppm, soem 100 some 500 and so on. On most things you will hapily get away with 500ppm and still ahve a wider process window but reduced cost. Another thing to remember is that now all ovens are created equal, you need to look at the machine your using vs the rest of the market. I'm generalising here but from my own experience I tend to find that US machine manufacturers care less about how much N2 their machines use than European ones due to the cost of N2 in the US compared to the rest of the world. Other option perhaps is look at a nitrogen generation plant?

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As stated above, Hydrogen is EXPLOSIVE, very bad idea. Management might have meant HELIUM, also inert.

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Maybe here's an opportunity to get a new oven. Electrovert, BTU and Vitronics offer closed-loop N2 control as an option. This, together with other improvements on oven design can reduce N2 consumption by as much as 40%. Not to mention reductions in electrical consumption too. Electrovert's new OmniEXCEL oven, for example consumes about 50% less electricity than the previous OmniFlo models. Ovens are improving performance in reduced utilities consumption and better at thermal transfer efficiency.

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Check out this site for on-site N2 generation. www.onsitegas.us

James

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