Reliable soldering through innovative process monitoring

Rehm Thermal Systems’ ProCap software offers continuous statistical process stability control, having been tailored specially for the Vision series system by Rehm. The developers made simple and efficient operation – not to mention a clear screen design – a top priority. Especially when it comes to changing products or manufacturing new assemblies, it’s a big challenge to coordinate all process parameters for optimal results.

During the entire soldering process, ProCap uses sensitive sensor technology to continuously measure the temperature and heat input over the complete assembly. From the very start, the process parameters are automatically stored for the product. Each further assembly is compared with the parameters saved about this product.

To do this, the first 50 assemblies of the products, metal plates or dummy boards are measured and compared as ‘statistical process control’. Statistical variables, such as the natural variance of the process, are determined in this baseline. This gives an average value as a reference for all further measurements and enables conclusions to be drawn about the stability of the production process, the machine capability and the reproducibility of the soldering profile.

A live window lists all current production parameters over the period, displays the target values and reliable tolerances and lists warnings in the current order. As soon as a value does not correspond to the standard and deviates from the baseline, the program displays an alarm message. Process deviations and user errors are logged at the same time.

Gradual changes, such as a clogging filter, can be identified reliably and promptly in this way. That makes ProCap ideally suitable for integrating predictive maintenance concepts. You can also view all process-technical data from the measurements, or document then export this as a PDF report for optimal traceability.

ProCap can be easily retrofitted to many systems, as no additional hardware is required for it to work. The program is also compatible with Rehm Thermal Systems’ ViCON software and designed as a service-client system. ProCap thus provides the option of monitoring all lines on which the software is installed from a remote workstation.