Today was the first installment of the chemistry portion of how PCBs (printed circuit boards) are analyzed. The other day, Ryan and I where introduced to the EEE (Environments effects Engineering) department and the huge machines and rooms used there, but the AE (Application Engineering) department does some similar things, just not on such a large scale. The AE department seems to be more focused on long term effects on the components that are used to produce the boards, not the actual finished products.
Where the EEE simply says (at least this is my interpretation of what they do) fail or pass on a complete PCBs, the AE tries to determine the best components to use for a particular project. Based on temperature extremes and changes (including rate of change) or other potentially product disrupting possibilities, they can give suggestions on which components to use to have a higher potential for success.
Another function of AE is to determine the cause of failure. My understanding is that EEE does not necessarily do that, but rather leaves the fixing up to the designing engineer. Our contact in AE, Roy, had many great stories about the problem solving they have to do. There are different potential causes for failure: bad product, damaged product, product contamination, exceeding the product's safe parameters, and other product related reasons. However, Roy talked about several times where the tests themselves were flawed due some unusual circumstances. One example was that the air intake for a refrigeration unit was compromised because the warmed up by a worker taking off there shoes and resting their feet over the intake register. This simple little issue caused the air taken into the machine to raise in temperature enough that the machine could not get the air cold enough for the test. It only took a 20-hour marathon work period for Roy to figure that one out. He said he had the epiphany as to what was causing the problem at 3AM. I'm sure you don't read about that kind of problem solving in those engineer-training text books.
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