Conformal coating is a specialty polymeric film-forming product that protects circuit boards, components, and other electronic devices from adverse environmental conditions. These coatings ‘conform’ to the irregular landscape of the PCB providing increased dielectric resistance, operational integrity, and protection from corrosive atmospheres, humidity, heat, fungus, and airborne contamination such as dirt and dust.
Techspray offers a variety of conformal coating formulas for differing field or engineering requirements and is IPC CC 830B and UL94-0 Qualified or rated. Specifications generally depend on the type of protection needed: e.g., thermal, moisture, or static resistance.
Coatings contain Opti/Scan (except LED Coating) to allow quality control inspection of coverage and evenness of the coating on a PCB. A coated board can be passed under a standard, low-cost UV (short-wave black) light to fluoresce the coated areas. The brighter the glow, the thicker the coating.
Application methods:
Every organization using hazardous chemicals within their facility has the responsibility to equip their facility and personnel to maintain exposure levels below the TLV. Personal monitoring badges can be used to measure exposure of a specific material. Then, depending on the threshold limit and the application, exposure can be controlled with PPE like masks, face shields, respirators, and even coveralls. If they don’t reduce exposure below the recommended limit, you will need to consider a special ventilation hood or even containment booth. As you can see, as the exposure limit gets down to a certain level, the equipment required to safely use the solvent can get impractical. At that point, your best option is to consider a safer alternative.
The dielectric strength is material intrinsic property and withstand voltage is surface property which depend on thickness of the material. They can be slightly different for thicker materials, but for conformal coating, the two numbers should be very close or the same. That is because we test coating at 3-5 mils thickness, calculate, then report the value per mil.
Conformal coating with UV tracer can be inspected with any typical UV lamp which has wavelength of 320-380 nm.