Designed experiments to investigate the solder joint quality output of a prototype automated surface mount replacement system

A robotic remanufacturing system at Rensselaer has been developed to replace fine pitch surface mounted components on a populated printed circuit board (PCB). The performance goal is to maximize the quality of the solder joint output to optimize the system's throughput. The purpose of this paper is to present the process parameters determined for obtaining a good solder joint with the rework cell. Developed here and to show an analysis of the solder joint quality obtained from the developed system. Maximizing the rate of correctly reworked components by the system is not chosen as a goal for measuring the system's performance. This is because rework is a low volume process and the cell being used, is an experimental prototype system.