Vapor Degreasing Fluids Remove Difficult Lead-Free and No-Clean Fluxes from Modern PCBS
Advancements in the electronics industry are continuously leading to more sophisticated, intricate and miniaturized circuitry, and cleaning these smaller, denser, hotter components has become a major issue. Additionally, lead-free, no-clean and halide-free flux formulations have introduced new cleaning obstacles, and the phase-out of old-style solvents has eliminated many popular choices. The purpose of this paper is to present a new cleaning chemistry and process for difficult no-clean, lead-free and high temperature flux residues on reflowed PCBs. The proposed solvents are drop-in replacements for older solvent cleaners and also are highly acceptable alternatives to complex aqueous cleaning systems. These new cleaning technologies enable high quality results with high through-put.