Product category:
Electronics Manufacturing Materials and Consumables
News Release from: HumiSeal Europe
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 25 April 2006
Coating and cleaning in focus at Nepcon
Concoat personnel will be available on Stand K77 at Nepcon UK to discuss significant advancements in both UV curable conformal coating materials and circuit board cleaning media.
Concoat personnel will be available on Stand K77 at Nepcon UK to discuss significant advancements in both UV curable conformal coating materials and circuit board cleaning media Concoat has made significant advancements in the field of UV curable conformal coating materials with HumiSeal UV40
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 6 May 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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Easy to process, it is extremely flexible, physically, making it less likely to "crack" under thermal cycling.
Offering a genuine alternative, with none of the problems associated with these materials.
High volume users in fields such as automotive and consumer electronics can now gain access to the popular UV curable coating class (because of its rapid cure speed) with a level of processing ease and thermal cycling resistance never before achieved with UV materials.
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By careful polymer engineering, from first principles, Concoat has developed what can be summarised chemically as a polyurethane-polyacrylate hybrid UV curable polymer structure.
This yields a macroscopic materials performance that, incredibly, is not dissimilar to the ease-of-processing and thermal cycling resistance offered by other established chemical coating material types such as the HumiSeal water-based ranges.
A key benefit is its low viscosity, which dramatically eases processing challenges in terms of being able to uniformly and quickly coat a board and ensure the coating spreads over all required areas.
In general UV curable coatings materials are more difficult to rework than, for instance, water-based alternatives.
Humiseal UV40 is an extremely flexible coating, particularly under the stresses associated with thermal cycling.
The coating is far less prone to cracking than all existing UV curable coatings, which has been the biggest drawback since their first introduction back in the 1980s.
The range has an exceptionally low solvents (less than 3% content), that meets all ISO14001 and major H and S/hazardous chemical regulatory requirements.
Lastly, UV curing ovens tend to be very compact, occupying less factory floor space than the machinery required to cure other types of coating material in a volume environment.
One way to reclaim factory floor space lost to the larger ovens and wave soldering baths demanded by the elevated processing temperatures of lead-free soldering.
The HumiSeal UV40 curables range deserves serious consideration by any medium to high volume coating user and any manufacturer in the process of switching to lead-free.
The CircuitKleen range of batch and inline cleaning media for circuit boards, stencils and jigs is chemically engineered to offer the highest level of cleanliness for all lead-free and lead based soldering materials and SMT adhesives.
The range has been designed to help manufacturers comply with increasing strict environmental and health and safety legislation, including the RoHS, WEEE and VOC reduction directives defined by the European Union, and the ISO14001 accreditation.
All of which have an impact on the flux cleaning processes and associated cleaning media.
Typically higher temperatures of lead-free soldering processes, for example, will 'bake' and adhere flux residues onto boards more strongly than occurred with conventional lead-based soldering.
The CircuitKleen low VOC water-based environmentally friendly flux cleaner is part of Concoat's ongoing development in tackling these issues.
Although designed to be left on a board, some manufacturers still remove no-clean flux residues by cleaning, yet such residues have an elevated inertness that makes them difficult to remove chemically.
This situation will be exacerbated by the advent of no-clean lead-free solders.
This saponified, water-based flux cleaner addresses these issues, delivering a superior cleaning performance by exploiting chemically optimised yet "green" compounds, to offer significantly enhanced rinse abilities that will safely and efficiently remove practically any solder paste, flux or wire residue.
Providing manufacturers with long term peace of mind.
Safe and pleasant for operators to use, it is virtually odour and foam-free, having minimal (trace) VOC content and being completely nonflammable.
This "gentleness" extends to advanced anticorrosion inhibitors that maximise protection of cleaning (ie alkaline) sensitive metals such as copper and those commonly used in the aerospace sector.
CircuitKleen also offers excellent plastics and elastomer compatibility making it suitable for use with most makes of batch cleaning equipment, boards and components.
And can be used at lower process temperatures with shorter cleaning times.
Finally, accessing these benefits does not incur a financial penalty, as it has a much higher cleaning capacity than conventional products.
This means a smaller volume of material will last up to 30% longer than other formulations and clean a larger number of assemblies to yield an overall cost saving.
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