Thermal management system for reflow oven

The internal thermal environment of a reflow oven is a complex 3D temperature distribution. Controlling an accurate reflow process requires to know the inside temperature distribution. Not all soldering equipments have mobile temperature systems built in. Usually, the oven designer doesn't include a monitoring measurement system that can control the instantaneous temperature at the PCB level. The lack of completed information about each solder joint, could produce an unstable quality of the soldering process. This is the reason we started a project to build a high-resolution temperature measurement system. The sensors are wire thermocouples to assure a high mobility. The system core contains a data acquisition card developed in our center. The application software takes into account the requirements for accurate temperature measurements. All details of this project are described in the paper.