Blog

 HumiSeal UV20Gel is a unique, strong, and flexible gel coating developed to protect PCB (Printed Circuit Boards) components against environmental conditions and vibrations. UV20Gel has proven successful in many demanding industries and product families including-

Durable Protection for Demanding Automotive Requirements

HumiSeal chemists have been designing state-of-the-art conformal coatings for nearly 70 years, first producing UV curable coatings more than two decades ago. At that time, UV curable technology was considered the next generation of coatings, mainly due to its advantages; including:

The counterfeit of electronic materials is nothing new in the industry. There are numerous sources of these fraudulent practices and they come in various forms. However, the most important aspect is the cost that these forged coatings have on users.

It is known and well documented that in today’s electronics industry there are some PCB board components that may come from manufacturer scraps, re-labeled unused parts, and removed components from used circuit boards. It has been reported that most these electronic components are integrated circuits. 

Have you ever experienced uncontrolled conformal coating migration?   Have you had to strip your recently coated boards because conformal coating wicked into non-desired keep out zones?   Wicking is a phenomenon caused by a combination of low surface tension coating, which is usually characterized by low viscosity, coupled with strong capillary forces generated by low standoff gaps possessed by the SMT process.   Wicking into connectors; onto grounding hole; or under sensitive components will create defects that will have to be reworked, as it may cause reliability concerns with the finished product, which we will describe in detail.   There are ways to either reduce and/or eliminate wicking issues through decisions made during preparation, application, and conformal coating selection.    

During your selection of conformal coating you ran in to a specification that you have seen before but not fully understood, MIL-I-46058C.   Conformal coating choices are vast, but with so many available, how does a user pick the correct one? Are there minimum standards that define what a conformal coating is supposed to do? Thankfully, yes there are. This article will focus on one such standard: MIL-I-46058C.

The official title for the specification is MIL-I-46058C, Insulating Compound (For Coating Printed Circuit Assemblies). The standard serves as a material standard, used to evaluate and document that a particular coating meets a list of specific performance attributes (more on those later). The MIL-I-46058C was developed to define a uniform set of test methods and performance requirements for conformal coatings and gives users confidence that the material they select will perform.