At THECA in Bangkok, IBL Löttechnik focused not only on international exchange with customers, partners and industry experts. Olaf Cieply, Global Sales Manager at IBL Löttechnik, also used the trade fair as an opportunity to discuss current developments in vapour phase soldering technology and the increasing automation of process control in several interviews. One of the key topics was Automatic Gradient Control (AGC).
Learn more about Automatic Gradient Control (AGC) and the automatic regulation of temperature gradients for stable and reproducible soldering profiles.
Instead of manually adjusting complex machine parameters to match one another, the user simply defines the desired temperature gradients for each phase of the soldering profile in °C per second. The software automatically calculates the required control parameters based on this information and continuously adjusts them throughout the entire process based on the actual measured temperature data.
This continuous feedback ensures that the specified gradients are reliably maintained even under varying process conditions. Deviations are detected in real time and automatically corrected. The result is highly reproducible temperature profiles, consistently high soldering quality, and significantly reduced process variations, regardless of whether individual prototypes or mass-produced assemblies are being manufactured. At the same time, operator influence is minimized, allowing even less experienced users to achieve reproducible results.
The importance of intelligent process control for the future of electronics manufacturing was also a topic of various discussions that Olaf Cieply held during THECA in Bangkok. In a total of three video interviews, he provides insights into current developments at IBL and discusses new ways to make vapour-phase soldering processes simpler, more transparent, and more automated.
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With solutions such as Automatic Gradient Control, IBL continues to drive the shift from traditional parameterization toward intelligent, closed-loop process control. For users, this means less effort in creating new soldering profiles, while also providing greater reproducibility and process reliability in vapour-phase soldering.
