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28 The PCB Magazine • October 2015 WHELEN ENGINEERING REDUCES CyCLE TIME By BUILDING A NEW AUTOMATED PCB FACTORy out but you guys are really close to just turning this thing on and letting it roll. Congratulations. Stepinski: Thanks. Matties: In general, I see that Mutracx is really the primary imaging over there. You were saying you've already run some 14,000 panels through there? Stepinski: We have about two-thirds of the process basically fully auto- mated. That means one person can run from deburr all the way through soldermask pre-treatment, and we're working on finalizing the soldermask process in the short term right now. Matties: What about chemical management? I see all these dose stations. Stepinski: After having worked in a lot of dif- ferent factories, I was not excited about having drums and containers partially full and having people checking inventory on things like that, having to deal with the potential safety issues of a lot of chemical transactions. What I mean by that is in the typical industry process you do an analysis and you potentially need to make an add. So you go to the drum and you make the add, which means a person has to handle the chemistry. I always worry that someone's going to have a bad day and put the wrong chemical in the wrong bath. I've seen it happen enough over my career that I wanted to minimize the risk of that as much as possible. We don't have any open drums here. We have day tanks for every- thing. They're all sized for the packages, they're all double contained, and they're all vented. When we get a package in, like a drum, we transfer the whole drum into the day tank one time with a two-person team checking each other. We've minimized the transactions because of that and then we have metering pumps on those day tanks that go to whatever location needs the chemistry. It's all controlled by the PLC, so there's nobody pumping any - thing. That reduces the transactions by well over 90% and increases our safety factor and reduces risk. Matties: Sounds like health and safety are big is- sues here. You have one lab in the center of your facility and one person that just maintains your baths, but that's not automated, right? Stepinski: We have automation in the lab itself to improve things. Most circuit board shops don't have an ICP, an inductively coupled plas- ma spectrophotometer. They use AA, which means you have to analyze every element indi- vidually and sit there for long periods of time to do that. We have an ICP which allows us to just put the sample in the auto sampler and walk away and do other things at the same time. FeATure mutracx lunaris system. chemical dosing stations.