Quality assured disassembly of electronic components for reuse

Nowadays, some producers consider the reuse of electronic components which were rejected from production processes. These components can be recycled and used as spare parts or as substitution parts in new products. Up to now, there has been no commercially applicable method and technology available for the automated reverse manufacturing process and the quality control of recovered components. This paper describes technological solutions for an economical recovery of electronic components as a basis for reuse. The main tasks in this respect are the development of an automated desoldering system consisting of commercially available standard components of automation engineering (hardware) as well as industrial image processing (software), the optimization of a desoldering process to guarantee the quality of the regained components and the quality testing of the extracted parts by analysis of their geometric parameters. As a result, an automated process was developed, which includes modules like pre-recognition and selection, quality assured desoldering, handling and visual quality inspection of form and measurement criteria.