Sensible Design

January 25, 2023

Sensible Design: Automotive Conformal Coating Applications

Conformal coatings are all around us. The benefits they offer are discreet but intensely purposeful, as they protect electronic circuitry against harsh environments and help to extend the reliability and lifetime of our devices. With a surge in connectivity adoption via IoT, smart cities, and smart infrastructure networks, the need to protect electronics in different devices is becoming more and more important.

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January 02, 2023

Sensible Design: Green Coats Are In

It goes without saying that bio-based coatings have significantly less impact on the environment and are better able to address the ethical and sustainability requirements of manufacturers and end users than conventional solvent-based coatings. However, the most surprising benefits observed during the development of many new bio-based conformal coatings have been the significant improvements to performance and reliability.

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November 23, 2022

Sensible Design: Encapsulation Resins—PU vs. Epoxy

Most resin systems in use today are extremely complex products with elaborate chemical formulations. Process characteristics and final properties are usually adjusted by the manufacturer to suit the customer’s requirements, and this necessitates a great deal of skill, knowledge, and experience. Yet resin technology is an often-overlooked area in electronics manufacturing. Over the past few years there have been several major developments in material formulation and utilisation that have resulted in extremely effective new products being brought to the market. Beth Massey takes the helm this month.

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October 26, 2022

Sensible Design: Avoiding Conformal Coating Pitfalls

Electronic circuits are abundant in modern life and will continue to surge in growth as former manual processes increasingly become automated. The rapid advances we see in technology are driving electronic circuitry to perform faster in harsher environments, in the smallest form, and with the lightest weight. Circuitry failure is not only inconvenient and expensive but as electronic infrastructures become more interconnected, individual failures will put an entire system at risk, which could ultimately put lives in danger for critical applications. It is so important to factor in careful consideration for conformal coatings. In this month’s column, Saskia Hogan covers some important areas to help you steer clear of coating disasters.

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September 21, 2022

Sensible Design: Comparing Traditional and Bio-based Resins

In this month’s column, two of Electrolube’s leading resin specialists have collaborated to give you the clearest focus of how introducing bio-based resins systems will impact your production process and the benefits they bring in terms of performance. Beth Turner is Electrolube’s senior technical specialist and Beth Massey is Electrolube’s global product manager for resins. Having two Beths working on resins may be a little confusing, but this column should help demonstrate the unique input each has and alleviate any confusion.

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August 22, 2022

Sensible Design: All Resins Are Not Created Equal

With so many different encapsulation resin options on the market, selecting a resin that is best suited for your application can present a real challenge. Today, there are a wide range of different resin systems available, offering a comprehensive range of different properties. It is often assumed that properties can vary moderately, however, resins can offer significantly different benefits. This month, Beth Massey will explore the different factors you will need to take into consideration when comparing resins for your application.

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July 14, 2022

Sensible Design: Can Solvent-free UV-cure Coatings Increase Stability and Throughput?

With environmental awareness at an all-time high, companies are looking for greener options in terms of the chemical products they use for the manufacture and protection of electronics, including conformal coatings that are applied to protect the metal surfaces from corrosion, condensation, dielectric breakdowns, and that mitigate against tin whisker formation and conductive metal particles. Traditionally, these materials have been solvent-based, resulting in low viscosity, easy-to-use materials. However, the use of solvents has become more restricted and there is increasing demand for solvent-free technology. In this month’s column, I’ll be looking at a particular solvent-free coating group—UV cure coatings.

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June 15, 2022

Sensible Design: Optimize Your Thermal Management

In this column, I’ll be looking at how to help you improve reliability through thermal management. Poor reliability arising from thermally induced circuit failures might prove detrimental to brand reputation, but if the application served a critical role, the outcome would be unthinkable. Such applications might include a safety critical device upon which the safety of personnel working in a hazardous environment might depend; one that simply would not function without proper thermal management procedures in place; a device that has a defined working temperature range when in use, or a piece of equipment designed to work in harsh or extreme conditions, which must work reliably, regardless of those conditions.

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May 27, 2022

Sensible Design: Why Some Conformal Coatings Fail in Service

In this month’s column, I’m going to examine why coatings sometimes fail in service, explore the reasons why they fail, and the steps that you can take to avoid failure in the first place. At Electrolube, we take great care in our research, product formulation and developing the appropriate processing and application techniques for our products, because we know that, on occasion, conformal coatings can fail. It is our business to understand why.

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May 04, 2022

Sensible Design: Let’s Take Down the Heat on Resins

Electrolube’s Senior Technical Manager Beth Turner picks up the thread of her previous columns to describe where resins are currently playing a vital role in the modern world, while also offering an insight into their thermal conductivity, suitability for RF applications, and exploring a new era of bio-based encapsulation resins that not only improve the environment at large, but also end-use reliability and increased consumer satisfaction.

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April 07, 2022

Sensible Design: What Can Manufacturers Expect from Bio-based Conformal Coatings?

Globally, managing finite resources is imperative as we strive to achieve a more innovative and lower emission economy. Reducing dependency on fossil fuels in the chemical industry has led to the emergence of new bio-based alternatives, but what do these bring to the table for electronics manufacturers? Bio-based materials, obtained from biological resources (biomasses, feedstock, plants, and biological waste), deliver a viable and sustainable alternative to materials derived from petrochemicals, and we have developed a new coating incorporating 75% bio-organic content from renewable sources. It’s a global first for the industry and is completely free from solvents.

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March 03, 2022

Sensible Design: How to Select the Best Resin Category for Your Application

Resin chemistries are extensively used for potting and encapsulation in the electronics and electrical industries but not everyone gets it right first time. With so many resin options available, deciding which resin is best suited for your application can present a challenge by itself. In this month’s column, Beth Turner looks at the features and benefits found in each of the three major categories: epoxy, polyurethane, and silicone. She highlights the different types of resin properties and applications, using examples.

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January 26, 2022

Sensible Design: Top Design Tips for a Successful Coating Process

Board design, cycle time and coating flow can all impact on a designer’s path to a successful coating process, so what are the key factors to bear in mind to achieve the best outcomes for your coating processes? In this months’ column, I’ll be highlighting some of the key challenges and commonly asked questions about conformal coatings that every Design Engineer should take into consideration when specifying the coating process. As assemblies become ever more densely populated, and housing /casing designs become more permeable to save weight, the use of conformal coatings is becoming essential to protect the assembly from its operating environment and ensure acceptable reliability for the application intended, especially when operating in hostile environments. Let’s explore some of the key factors that will help following our five-point Q&A format.

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January 05, 2022

Sensible Design: The Rise of Resins in IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a platform enabling embedded devices connected to the internet, to collect and exchange data with each other. Devices can begin to interact and work with each other, even learning from each other’s experience as humans do. The potential for the IoT and connectivity is endless, as everyday objects can connect and share intelligence and knowledge. What role do resins play?

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October 27, 2021

Sensible Design: Are Encapsulation Resins Suitable for EV Applications?

In this month’s column, I will be exploring how resin chemistries can be incorporated by design engineers facing ever increasing new challenges from E-mobility applications.

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September 23, 2021

Sensible Design: How to Increase the Reliability of Conformal Coatings

For this month’s column, Phil Kinner examines the main methods for achieving the best outcome for your conformal coating process, ultimately increasing the protection afforded by your coating and lifetime of your product.

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August 24, 2021

Sensible Design: Selecting Resins for Effective Resistance in End-Use Environments

In this series on resins, I started by going back to basics, questioning the core rationale for resin choice and application. This month, let’s take a closer look at the fundamental chemistries of potting and encapsulation resins and examine how each resin type offers individual properties that can be exploited to maximise performance under a wide range of environmental conditions.

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July 27, 2021

Sensible Design: Resins—Fundamental Considerations for Circuit Designers

New Electrolube columnist Beth Turner starts a series on the all-important subject of resin selection, types of chemistries available and their properties, application, mix and cure.

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July 06, 2021

Sensible Design: Thermal Management—Good Design Practice for Heat Dissipation

Trial and error is an essential process in the development of new and innovative products however, excessive testing can be unnecessary and costly. Incorporating thermal management at the preliminary stage of your design process will ultimately lead to more reliable and cost-effective end products.

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May 24, 2021

Sensible Design: Conformal Coating Vs. Encapsulation Resin

Without a doubt, this is the biggest question we get asked regularly at Electrolube is “When is it suitable to use a conformal coating or an encapsulated resin?”. There are a number of considerations that will determine the answer, however, it depends largely on your how the circuit will be housed within the assembly as well as the type of environment in which it will operate.

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April 20, 2021

Sensible Design: Growth and Trends in the Thermal Management Market

Electrolube’s Jade Bridges reminds us why thermal management plays such a vital function in circuit and electronic assembly design, and explores the factors contributing to the current growth curve in the market.

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March 10, 2021

Sensible Design: The Role of Resins and Conformal Coatings in Your Applications

This month, Phil Kinner examines some of the key differences between conformal coatings, encapsulation resins and potting compounds to help designers make more informed decisions, and ultimately help to increase the performance, reliability and lifetime of your electronic circuitry. He also looks at issues that some of you may have with mixing resin packs and air bubbles, what can go wrong and why.

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February 15, 2021

Sensible Design: How to Avoid Problematic ‘Blushing’ and ‘Bubbling’ in Conformal Coatings

In this month’s column, Phil Kinner revisits a couple of general enquiries Electrolube has received about "bubbling' and also, the less common appearance of cloudy, white patches following the application of a conformal coating.

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December 28, 2020

Sensible Design: To Coat or Encapsulate—Making An Informed Choice for Electronics Protection

One of the most frequently asked questions we receive from customers is, “Which is better to protect my PCB: a coating or a resin?” In this month’s column, Phil Kinner demystifies why one may be more suitable for your application than the other and explores coatings and resins in more detail.

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November 10, 2020

Sensible Design: Top Tips for a Successful Thermal Management Process

Jade Bridges concentrates on some of the complications you are likely to encounter when selecting and applying a thermal interface material and looks a little more closely at thermal resistance, viscosity, and vibration, as well as their effects on performance. Read on to learn how to fully optimize your thermal management process.

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October 23, 2020

Sensible Design: Pushing the Boundaries of Thermal Management

Thermal management plays a central role in circuit and electronic assembly design, ensuring improved reliability and increased performance of devices. But what if you could push the boundaries even further and extend the long-term stability? To explore how this can be achieved, Jade Bridges touches on some of the latest advances in thermal management technology.

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September 17, 2020

Sensible Design: Key Benefits of Resins and Differences From Coatings

Alistair Little focuses on the benefits of using a thermally conductive encapsulation resin and compare the difference between using a resin and a conformal coating. He also looks more closely at the best way to mix a resin pack and what to be wary of if air bubbles get trapped in the cured resin.

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August 19, 2020

Sensible Design: How to Overcome Conformal Coating Challenges

Phil Kinner takes a look at some issues you are sure to face, from areas of the coated board that simply refuse to cure fully to masking components to the orange peel effect and examining the difference between a critical and a non-critical area of a board.

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June 15, 2020

Sensible Design: Resins–Are They All About Chemistry?

When it comes to resin selection and application, there are a plethora of factors to consider. Alistair Little looks at thermally conductive resins, flexible resins, elevated cure temperatures, resin types for different applications, and resin systems that enable wider operating temperatures.

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February 15, 2020

Sensible Design: Encapsulation Resins—What Could Go Wrong?

Alistair Little addresses some of the pain points with mixing resin packs and air bubbles, including what can go wrong and why. He also examines some of the key differences between conformal coatings, encapsulation resins, and potting compounds to help designers make decisions that are more informed, ultimately increasing the reliability and lifetime of your electronic circuitry.

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January 15, 2020

Sensible Design: Five Top Resin Tips

Alistair Little provides some useful advice on encapsulation resins to help designers achieve even higher levels of reliability when it comes to protecting circuitry. He highlights five critical factors affecting encapsulation resins, including potential contaminants, no-clean/cleaning processes, adhesion, and best mixing practice.

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November 15, 2019

Sensible Design: Design Challenges and the Impact on Coating Success

Phil Kinner concentrates on essential factors regarding the challenges board designs can pose on designers to help you implement a more successful coating operation, as well as issues that may arise with coating coverage, cycle time, and coating flow.

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May 15, 2020

Sensible Design: Conformal Coating Enemies—Challenges Sabotaging Your Process

Phil Kinner examines the arch enemies to conformal coatings.

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October 18, 2019

Sensible Design: Five Key Factors for Flexible Resins and Potting Sensitive Components

In this month’s column, I am going to concentrate on protecting sensitive components and take a more in-depth look at flexible resins, their reworkability, and some of the common problematic consequences that you may encounter. Potting compounds play an important role in the electronics industry where they serve to protect sensitive components from chemicals, moisture, dust, and damage, but their selection can baffle many. Let’s explore some frequently asked questions in more detail.

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June 09, 2020

Sensible Design: Thermal Management—Keeping Cool Starts From Within

Thermal management plays a significant role in protecting electronic circuitry. Jade Bridges takes a fresh look at popular subjects within the field of thermal management and explores what occurs when devices overheat, as well as the benefits of thermal gap fillers and how to best avoid pump-out.

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May 25, 2020

Sensible Design: Thermal Management—Five Tips for Application Success

With so much to consider when choosing a thermal management material, it’s important to do your calculations, consider the equipment’s operational, and environmental conditions and experiments. Underestimating these could compromise the reliability of an electronic assembly and shorten its life expectancy. Jade Bridges shares five tips to improve your thermal management process.

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May 05, 2020

Sensible Designs: Resins—Five Tips for Potting and Performance

Readers continue to ask, “Does thicker coverage achieve better performance? What is the best advice for manual potting? We chose an inappropriate resin, so how will this affect our application?” In this column, Alistair Little explores these and other issues based upon frequently asked questions from Electrolube’s customers.

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December 31, 2019

Sensible Design: Top Tips for Conformal Coating Selection

Over the past few months, I have covered the topic of conformal coatings in as much depth as possible. In this column, I’m going to explore some of the essential factors for designers in coating selection. As we have all experienced, sometimes, things are not always as simple or straightforward as we would like them to be, and in any engineering discipline, there is always the slightest chance that something might go wrong. Thankfully, the key to kicking that possibility is to be as fully prepared as possible. Thus, I’m going to concentrate on helping you avoid coating pitfalls in my five-point guide.

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August 29, 2019

Conformal Coatings: How to Design Out Production Problems

In my last few columns, I’ve covered quite a bit of ground regarding the important considerations for conformal coating selection and performance, and the suitability of conformal coatings for LEDs and protecting circuitry from the harshest environments. I hope these columns have provided plenty of food for thought as well as given you a basic understanding of coatings and their benefits and limitations. In this column, I’m going to look at the different angles that design engineers and purchasing professionals come from and explore how these can sometimes conflict when selecting conformal coatings.

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July 18, 2019

Sensible Design: Resins Fit for a Purpose—Failure Mitigation and Environmental Concerns

So far, in my columns on resin chemistries and encapsulation/potting techniques, I have tended to concentrate on the properties of these materials. My insights have included how they are best applied in the factory, and the steps that must be taken to get the best performance from them once they are in the field to protect an electronic assembly or lighting fixture against the elements. In this column, I am going to address the question of resin failures—in particular, how to avoid them—and to get a better idea of where and how appropriately selected and applied modern resins are making a big difference in the world of extreme electronics installation and implementation.

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June 06, 2019

Thermal Management: Why It Should Be High on Your Circuit Protection Agenda

In my previous column, Jade Bridges highlighted a few cautionary notes on the pain points associated with thermal management products, particularly the choices that you will be confronted with, such as which material or product type (i.e., pad or paste) is best suited to your application. In this column, she will underline the importance of getting it right, and touch on the consequences if you don’t.

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May 16, 2019

Sensible Design: Five Tips to Further Improve Resin Encapsulant Performance

There are a number of different factors that influence the protection afforded by potting compounds. The act of encapsulating a component or PCB means that it is surrounded by a layer of resin, which completely seals a component or an entire PCB from the environment in which it operates. When mixed, a two-part resin starts a chemical reaction, which results in the resin becoming fully polymerised to provide a homogenous layer.

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April 25, 2019

Sensible Design: Important Considerations for Conformal Coating Selection and Performance

Having covered the subject of conformal coatings in depth over the past few months, now is an appropriate time to review some of the key pointers I have tried to share in my various columns. I present some of my thoughts on the essentials in this five-point guide.

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March 28, 2019

Sensible Design: Thermal Management Materials—Golden Rules for Product Selection

Selecting the right type of thermal management method that will suit a particular electronic assembly and its predicted operating conditions is far from easy. There are a number of stages in the selection process that you should consider taking before you decide upon a particular material or material format, whether paste or pad. In this column on achieving effective thermal management of electronic assemblies, I will revisit our trusted question-and-answer format to bring you some essential pointers, beginning with a few cautionary notes on pain points—the occasional pangs of agony you will have to face during the decision-making process.

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March 07, 2019

Sensible Design: Getting the Best Performance from Encapsulation Resins

When I last broached the subject of potting and encapsulation resins, I went into some depth on the subject, explaining their chemistries and physical properties, how they behave when being mixed, applied and cured. For this column, I’m going to return to our tried-and-trusted Q&A format to offer four commonly asked questions about resins and their application, together with my responses, which I hope will help you achieve the best outcomes for all your potting and encapsulation jobs. So, setting material choice aside for the moment, let’s start with a key aspect of potting: getting the resin in place.

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January 02, 2019

Top Five Tips to Protect PCBs from Harsh Environments

First, think very carefully about the sort of environment your PCB is likely to encounter. It is easy to over-engineer a product so that it will survive the very worst of conditions, but worst conditions may only be fleeting or transient. Therefore, a resin solution with a lower temperature performance specification will often cope. Take temperature extremes as an example; your application may experience occasional temperature spikes of up to 180°C, which you might feel deserves treatment with a special resin. However, such excursions may only be short-lived.

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December 19, 2018

Sensible Design: Top Tips for Successful Potting

For effective potting, ideally, the layout of the circuit components should be such that the material can flow smoothly around them without too much turbulence. When possible, it is always good practice to space components in a regular pattern. Irregular spacing—particularly bunching of components in discrete areas of the PCB—causes the formation of eddies in the resin as it is poured, which can lead to voids and air entrapment, which compromise the thermal performance of the resin.

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July 03, 2018

Protecting PCBs from Harsh, Challenging Environments

Think very carefully about the sort of environment your PCB is likely to encounter. It is easy to over-engineer a product so that it will survive the very worst of conditions, but worst conditions may only be fleeting or transient. Therefore, a resin solution with a lower temperature performance specification will often cope. Take temperature extremes, for example. Your application may experience occasional temperature spikes of up to 180°C, which you might feel deserves treatment with a special resin.

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August 21, 2017

Resins: Cutting Through the Technical Jargon

This month, I’m going to cut through some of the more heavy-going tech-speak, taking a few of my customers’ more frequently asked questions about resins to try to help you refine your selection process. There’s a lot of ground to cover, but for the purposes of this column, let’s concentrate on the PCB’s operating environment, caring for the components that are to be encapsulated, and the special needs of applications like LED lighting and RF systems.

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May 03, 2017

Casting a Spotlight on Resin Applications

Over the last few columns, I’ve given readers pointers on virtually every aspect of potting and encapsulation resins, ranging from their formulations and special properties to their applications, benefits and limitations. It’s probably high time, therefore, to take a step back from the do's and don’ts and focus instead on how these resins are bringing very real benefits to practical electronic and electrical engineering applications. A good starting point is to look at the special requirements of an industry that is enjoying explosive growth: LED lighting.

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December 19, 2016

Resins: Five Essentials to Achieve the Right Cure

In my previous column, I looked at some of the critical things you need to consider before selecting your resin. Of course, when it comes to the choice and application of resins, there’s a lot of information to take in, and over the following months I hope to distill this and provide some useful tips and design advice that will help you in your quest for reliable circuit protection.

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November 21, 2016

Why are Resin Properties So Important?

I started this series of columns on resins by going back to basics, questioning the core rationale for potting and encapsulation with resins, their fundamental chemistries and how each resin type differs one from the other—indeed, how their individual properties can be exploited to maximise performance under a wide range of environmental conditions. I hope readers found this useful. Of course, when it comes to the choice and applications of resins, there’s a great deal more to discuss.

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October 17, 2016

The Little Guide to Resins

I would like to start this series of columns by going back to basics, questioning the core rationale for potting and encapsulation with resins, their fundamental chemistries and how each resin type differs one from the other—indeed, how their individual properties can be exploited to maximise performance under a wide range of environmental conditions.

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October 18, 2018

Do's and Don'ts of Thermal Management Materials

Selecting a thermal management material that is broadly applicable to a particular electronic assembly and its predicted operating conditions is a good starting point; however, as with many of these things, the devil is very much in the details! Find out the key considerations in choosing your materials.

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August 02, 2018

Thermal Management Materials: Easing the Decision-Making Process

There are many different types of thermally conductive materials, and choosing between them will be dictated by production requirements and application design, as well as critical performance factors that must be achieved.

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December 26, 2017

Heat Transfer and Thermal Conductivity: The Facts

In my first two columns, I presented a broad introduction to the subject of thermal management of electronic circuits. This month I’m taking a closer look at thermal interface materials—how they can be applied to achieve efficient heat transfer, and the significance of bulk thermal conductivity in relation to heat transfer and thermal resistance.

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September 25, 2017

Thermal Management—The Heat is On

Thermal management materials are designed to prolong equipment life and reduce incidences of failure. They also maintain equipment performance parameters and reduce energy consumption by reducing operating temperatures, and minimising the risk of damage to surrounding components. Indirectly, they maintain brand reputation, as the reliability of the equipment will be very dependent upon the effectiveness of the thermal management technique used.

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September 26, 2018

Conformal Coatings: An Evolving Science

One of the trends impacting the electronics assembly industry is the continuing miniaturization of electronics products. This article sheds more light on coating problems posed by this trend, as well as provide key considerations when it comes to coating properties, selections, and applications. Read on to find answers to five of the best coating-related questions that frequently arise during preliminary consultations.

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April 04, 2018

My Top Coating Queries

This is my first of many columns for 2018, and I have decided to share some top trending queries that concern many different applications and areas. LEDs are always a hot topic, as are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and harsh environment concerns.

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September 21, 2016

Conformal Coatings - Beware the Boards that ‘Bare’ All!

This month, Phil Kinner departs from his usual format of providing five essential facts about conformal coatings. Instead, he provides an account of a customer’s problem—no company names mentioned, of course—that brought into question the adhesion performance of a coating that they had been using successfully for some time.

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August 23, 2016

When Coatings Go Wrong

This month, I consider some of the more common, and often very frustrating, problems that may be encountered when coating electronic circuit boards and components. I also discuss some practical solutions. As we all know, nothing in life is straightforward.

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June 28, 2016

Coatings—Five Essentials for Designers

In an ideal world, PCB designs would not have an inherent weak point for corrosion; unfortunately, in the real world, they do. When a weak point is revealed, you are better equipped to deal with it. Often the spacing of components, board finish and distance to ground planes can be optimised for corrosion resistance.

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