Eliminating Reflow Oven Recipe Mistakes at Changeover

Eliminating Reflow Oven Recipe Mistakes at Changeover

How many times have you run production boards (PCBs) through your reflow oven on the wrong recipe? You can pretend it never happened, but the likelihood is that it “never happened” to you on more than one occasion!

We are all human and get distracted in a busy production environment and simply forget to change the oven over to the right recipe – it’s human error right!

Even engineers with good knowledge of the process can make this simple mistake, so imagine how easy it is for operators and other users, doing this on a daily basis, to produce a batch of ‘suspect’ boards.

The true ‘Cost’ of manufacturing boards on the wrong reflow recipe is hard to measure. Depending on the differences in the thermal profile (temperatures and conveyor speed) some extra manual inspection of critical areas of a sample of boards would be the minimum requirement to satisfy your own quality needs, but it could mean 100% inspection of every board, or even rework and manual soldering of every board. Worse still, it could mean scrapping the entire batch, if the solder joint quality is compromised and the product is critical in nature (such as Automotive, Aerospace, Military or Medical).

KIC ProBot can eliminate the human element of this error by stopping boards entering the oven (SMEMA controlled lines can be stopped automatically) or by simply creating an audible/visible alarm to raise the attention of the user to manual halt production.

This is achieved by adding a product ID barcode label (or using an existing barcode label) to each board or panel – a unique code for that given product, which KIC then reads and checks against a list of allowable products for that reflow recipe – if it doesn’t match it’s not allowed in.

When using ProBot you have access to a host of additional features that add quality at every stage; process improvement, traceability and historical production data.

Process Improvement

ProBot offers Automated Profiling as standard – a thermal profile for every board produced, and without any user intervention.

It also eliminates manual profile verification – no need to run a check profile every month, week, day or shift…per oven, as ProBot provides this, for every board and automatically.

Traceability

ProBot provides the user with batch traceability of every build, but also optional Lot traceability or with barcoded PCBs (serialised with PCB label or laser marked) it offers FULL traceability.

Historical Production Data

Imagine being able to find a profile for every board you’ve ever produced, not only 100% traceability but also instant proof of the thermal process for that specific board or panel; as an OEM this should be an invaluable quality & traceability tool, and as a CEM it will make your customer audits easy, whilst proving to them exactly how serious you are about the quality of your reflow process.