| | Does anyone use reflow profilers? Are they a good investement or is trial and error sufficient? | | | | Does anyone have any suggestions on profiles to try? Thanks. | | | Danielm | I would hazard a guess that most if not all of us production folk do. I can't imagine not being able to know what was going on inside my oven. Trial and error might work in a small batch oven where the cycle can be controlled. | Try to replicate the profile suggested by your paste manufacturer. | Read the thread on oven temperature lower on the forum page. | John Thorup | | | | | | | Danielm,
Profiling is one of the most important part's of electronic's manufacturing. Like John above I can't imagin not knowing what's going on inside that oven. Are you overheating the board / component's is it reflowing too long or not long enough, does my oven need maintained, these are a few of the thing's that you need to know to make good product never mind having an auditable process for customer's or quality std's.
Ideally you should be profiling before you run a batch of card's so you are sure your ovan is A ok, a minimum of once a week at worst with a calibration pallet.
There are 3 main system's that I've looked at Multicore's Oracle, Datapaq and Kic. They all have their good and bad point's. The Kic system is being supplied by alot of oven manufacturer's built in and the dataloger can be used as a stand alone, it does not bad prediction stuff and give's a nice simple green or red light for a good and bad profile. The multicore one is very impressive, it's very user friendly and models the oven's very well, it's prediction software is so good you almost don't have to go near the oven. It's got a system where you can drag the thermal curve to where you want it in term's of temperatures and it will give you the setting's to meet it. It's also smart enough to know that there are part's of the ovan that can't be adjusted like the zone edges and that your oven has a max temperature for each zone so after you model the oven it wont let you try and predict something your ovan can't do. The down side is that the multicore stuff wont run on a network so you can't share file's as it uses an expert system design to run prediction's for settings. The datapaq is nice n simple to use and it's prediction software is getting better all the time, it is networkable and does eveything you need the new 9000 series mole has load's of storage capacity and it can recharge while your downloading the data to the PC, they also have new software dure out soon.
There's almost an article for the smt express in the profiler's I'd guess like a road test...mmmm I wonder..
Anyway's yes you need to profile and there are many of them on the market but you have to get the onbe that suit's you best and that's doen by talking to the vendor's and trying them all out.
JohnW
reply »