Great popularity for Ersa Technology Forum
Technical presentations and live demos on the entire electronics manufacturing process chain
At the Technology Forum at the end of September, Ersa General Sales Manager Rainer Krauss was able to welcome a total of around 120 customers, business partners and interested parties in Wertheim am Main – one of the first real meetings for the Electronics family in 2020. An important signal for customers and business partners alike – although in compliance with a strict hygiene concept.
“It was the first event in this format for Ersa – we did everything we could to completely map electronics production with printing, assembly, soldering,” said Rainer Krauss. In addition to technical presentations and live exhibits on all process areas of electronics manufacturing – reflow, selective, wave, automated rework, Industry 4.0, automation and hand soldering – the participants followed guided tours of the new Ersa Factory 2 to see how the soldering systems are produced in state-of-the-art flow-cycle production. One floor up, there were live demonstrations of Ersa systems and electronics production equipment from business partners (assembly, exhaust air filtering).
At the beginning there were presentations about wave and selective soldering as well as stencil printing. Under the title “Selective and wave soldering: highest flexibility for every requirement” the soldering processes for through-hole technology (THT) were presented. In addition, the interaction of relevant process parameters (solder temperature, wetting time, solder wave height, solder nozzle diameter) and solder joint boundary conditions were discussed – as well as the defined, programmable no-clean flux application.
High first yield with sophisticated strategy
In the case of stencil printing, the focus was on “errors in the printing process and consequences in the SMT line”. In order to prevent minor problems in the course of individual process steps from becoming major problems in real production, numerous influencing variables such as the PCB, components, process, equipment used and the environment must be taken into account in addition to the printing and reflow process. A high first pass yield (FPY) can be achieved with a sophisticated strategy that combines productivity and quality, but also keeps an eye on costs.
In the further course of the event, “Industry 4.0: Ready for the digital future with Kurtz Ersa CONNECT” presented a central gateway solution for all digital solutions, ranging from entry-level solutions (“quick wins”) to completely networked production. The experts from Kurtz Ersa Automation presented “Key Solutions for THT electronics production”, including quality check solutions, pick-and-place handling and soldering system peripherals such as lifting, lowering or rotating stations, height compensation modules as well as transport routes and workstations in-line and offline. Best practice solutions in the field of automation including robot handling were also presented..
Further perfected soldering quality
Behind “Void-free vacuum brazing for future applications: 5G. E-mobility. LED lighting technology. High Current Technology.” concealed reflow soldering with vacuum chamber, which further perfects the soldering quality. This begins even before the soldering process by steps that build on each other, such as layout and printing of the PCB and subsequent assembly. This is followed by a quality assessment by X-Ray or AOI.
Ersa Tools also presented its areas of hand soldering, rework and inspection – topics were “Hand soldering & solder fume extraction – safe manual processes and health prevention at the workplace”, “Automated piston soldering with the SolderSmart – repeatable and reliable” as well as “Automated rework – ultimate flexibility from 01005 to big boards”, which allows components of 22 x 22 mm and PCBs of 150 x 150 mm to components of 60 x 60 mm and board formats up to 625 x 1,250 mm to be processed safely and reproducibly.
After a lot of soldering technology input, the Technology Forum participants strengthened themselves at the end of the day with a barbecue, before on the second day all those presentation appointments that had led to overlaps on the first day could be taken up. All participants were positive about the Technology Forum with in-house exhibition, so that a repetition next year is already decided.