Refined Approach on Controlling Heat Transfer in a Vapour Phase Soldering Oven

The control of soldering temperature profiles is crucial in any reflow process of electronic assemblies. In our paper a novel approach is presented on the control of the temperature during vapour phase soldering process. In the given case the electronic surface mounted assembly to be soldered is immersed into the vapour with a special sample holder system and moved up and down by a flexible LabVIEW hardware and software configuration. It was found that with proper data acquisition and appropriate programming, the system is able to follow pre-programmed soldering profiles with small deviation. The paper presents the system, the experimental configuration and initial results obtained with the setup. The proposed setup can improve the current view on proper heat transfer handling in VPS ovens, and also enables precise control on investigations with different low-temperature solder alloys, and most importantly, thermally sensitive substrates, such as biodegradable epoxies, or moulded interconnect devices.