Intelligent Jet Fluxing
I am excited to introduce a significant innovation in wave soldering technology. In many cases, problems related to wave soldering stem from the flux application. Intelligent jet fluxing substantially reduces the cost associated with wave soldering and dramatically improves your overall process.
Traditional spray fluxing treats the entire board the same - it is unable to tailor how flux is applied to the diverse features within each board. Until now, the only available fluxing option was to spray the entire pallet with a uniform quantity of flux. If one point needed more flux, the entire board got that much flux. The traditional method is wasteful, messy, normally leads to unintended quality problems, and has high direct and indirect costs.
Intelligent jet fluxing allows you selectively pinpoint flux on the areas of the board (not the pallet) that need flux. More importantly, your are able to select the diameter, pressure, and volume of each jet dot as needed within a single board.
Here is a short video showing selective jet fluxing in action.
Some benefits of selective jet fluxing are:
Reduce cost using 65-95% less flux
• Lower direct cost (less flux consumed)
• Less dross in solder - longer interval between cleanup (more wave uptime)
• Pallets do not need to be cleaned
• Easy machine cleanup (simply wipe the nozzle)
• Less fumes (almost none)
• Lower environmental impact
Profoundly improve quality with precise control of each jet point:
• Ability to program pressure and volume per shot to “focus” on problematic barrels
• Eliminate flux wicking between pallet an board and contaminating masked areas
• Multiple non-consecutive shots per point
• Indirect shots can fill barrels without shooting through and “raining” on top of board
• Closed-loop feedback of every variable to verify every dot is placed as programmed
• Lower flux consumption may allow the use of higher-quality flux without increasing cost
Other advantages:
• Ability to apply multiple flux materials on a single board or different boards back-to-back
• Controlled deceleration of pallet to avoid disturbing components
• Extremely reliable – closed-loop feedback works in conjunction with self-maintenance procedures detect and automatically address many “common” issues without impacting yield
• Easy to program - Import photo of board, establish scale, click on photo to select flux points with default settings, parametrize individual points as needed
I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you in more detail. You can reach me at will.hunter@mtaautomation.com