HumiSeal Advances Product in Environmentally Friendly Cleaning Media
20 July 2006
The CircuitKleen range of batch and in-line cleaning media for circuit boards, stencils and jigs, from HumiSeal Europe, is chemically engineered to offer a high level of cleanliness for all the demanding requirements in the safe way, including lead-free and lead based soldering materials and SMT adhesives.
The range has been designed to help manufacturers comply with increasing strict environmental and health and safety legislation, including the reduction of harmful substances (RoHS), lead-free manufacturing (WEEE) and solvents emissions directives (VOC to atmosphere Reduction) within Europe and also assists with ISO14001 accreditation.
The CircuitKleen range of cleaning media is designed to meet the challenges of the increasingly difficult to remove residues left by no clean and lead-free soldering processes. Although today's soldering materials have been highly developed to remain on the board, many manufacturers do clean their assemblies post soldering for optimum reliability and coating performance, as many other unseen residues may well be present which can interfere with the conformal coating performance and ultimately the long term reliability of the board. The higher temperatures of lead-free soldering processes (40-50°C on board) will cause greater oxidation and degree of polymerisation of the flux residues and therefore be much harder to remove compared to conventional lead based flux residues.
CircuitKleen products have been created to deliver non-hazardous cleaning at low temperatures, for all types of batch and in-line equipment. This has been achieved by careful selection of the raw materials and construction into carefully balanced formulae, which give the user superior cleaning and rinsing abilities, shorter process cycles and extended working life.
