Folks,
I remember in 1994 (can it be 30 years ago?) that a colleague commented that in 5 years, wave soldering would go away. Well, 30 years have passed and wave soldering is still with us. Since wave is still with us, I developed a wave solder calculator to help set up the wave process. Let’s take a look at it.
Consider the following example:
See the figure below. A PWB is to be wave soldered. It is 30 cm long (BL) and we plan to have the PWBs 10 cm apart (SP). The heated tunnel length (HTL) is 240 c, the solder wave length (WL) is 3 cm, and the cycle time is 25 seconds. By putting these metrics into cells B2 to B6, we see that the time in the heated tunnel (THT) is 150 seconds, the belt speed (BS) must be 1.60 cm/s and the time the board is in the solder wave (TIW) is 1.88 seconds.
Figure. The input and output of the Wave Solder Calculator.
If you would like a copy of the Wave Solder Calculator send me an email at rlasky@indium.com.
Cheers,
Dr. Ron