J.M. Cabrera

Printed circuit boards: A review on the perspective of sustainability

Modern life increasingly requires newer equipments and more technology. In addition, the fact that society is highly consumerist makes the amount of discarded equipment as well as the amount of waste from the manufacture of new products increase at an alarming rate. Printed circuit boards, which form the basis of the electronics industry, are technological waste of difficult disposal whose recycling is complex and expensive due to the diversity of materials and components and their difficult separation. Currently, printed circuit boards have a fixing problem, which is migrating from traditional Pb-Sn alloys to lead-free alloys without definite choice. This replacement is an attempt to minimize the problem of Pb toxicity, but it does not change the problem of separation of the components for later reuse and/or recycling and leads to other problems, such as temperature rise, delamination, flaws, risks of mechanical shocks and the formation of whiskers. This article presents a literature review on printed circuit boards, showing their structure and materials, the environmental problem related to the board, some the different alternatives for recycling, and some solutions that are being studied to reduce and/or replace the solder, in order to minimize the impact of solder on the printed circuit boards.

Equal channel angular pressing of a TWIP steel: microstructure and mechanical response

A Fe–20.1Mn–1.23Si–1.72Al–0.5C TWIP steel with ultrafine grain structure was successfully processed through equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) at warm temperature up to four passes following the BC route. The microstructure evolution was characterized by electron backscattered diffraction to obtain the grain maps, which revealed an obvious reduction in grain size, as well as a decrease in the twin fraction, with increasing number of ECAP passes. The texture evolution during ECAP was analyzed by orientation distribution function. The results show that the annealed material presents brass (B) as dominant component. After ECAP, the one pass sample presents A1* and A2* as the strongest components, while the two passes and four passes samples change gradually toward

Influence of composition, grain size, and oxide particles on the strength of consolidated ball-milled iron

B/bar{B}

Hot deformation behavior, dynamic recrystallization, and physically-based constitutive modeling of plain carbon steels

B/B¯ components. TEM analysis shows that all samples present twins. The twin thickness is reduced with increasing the number of ECAP passes. Nano-twins, as a result of secondary twinning, are also observed in the one and two passes samples. In the four passes sample, the microstructure is extensively refined by the joint action of ultrafine subgrains, grains and twins. The mechanical behavior was studied by tensile samples, and it was found that the yield strength and the ultimate tensile strength are significantly enhanced at increasing number of ECAP passes. Although the ductility and strain hardening capability are reduced with ECAP process, the present TWIP steel shows significant uniform deformation periods with positive work hardening rates.

Determination of the critical conditions for the initiation of dynamic recrystallization in boron microalloyed steels

The TWIP steels show high strain hardening rates with high ductility which results in high ultimate tensile strength. This makes their processing by equal channel angular pressing very difficult. Up to now, this has only been achieved at warm temperatures (above 200xa0°C). In this paper, a FeMnCAl TWIP steel has been processed at room temperature and the resulted microstructure and mechanical properties were investigated. For comparison, the material has also been processed at 300xa0°C. The TWIP steel processed at room temperature shows a large increase in yield strength (from 590 in the annealed condition to 1295xa0MPa) and the ultimate tensile strength (1440xa0MPa) as a consequence of a sharp decrease in grain size and the presence within the grains of a high density of mechanical twins and subgrains. This dense microstructure results also in a loss of strain hardening and a reduction in ductility. The material processed at 300xa0°C is more able to accommodate deformation and has lower reduction in grain size although there is a significant presence of mechanical twins and subgrains produced by dislocation activity. This material reaches an ultimate tensile strength of 1400xa0MPa with better ductility than the room temperature material.

Thermal stability of ultrafine grains size of pure copper obtained by equal-channel angular pressing

In this paper iron powders with two oxygen content (0.2 and 0.6% wt.) have been mechanically milled and consolidated by hot static pressing at different temperatures to obtain different grain sizes. At lower temperatures the grain size was in the nanostructured and ultrafine range and with increasing temperature abnormal grain growth was observed for both compositions. This led to the development of bimodal grain size distributions. In the samples with lower oxygen content the grain size and the percentage of coarse grain areas were larger than in the case of high oxygen content. The strength and ductility have been determined by tensile tests. For low oxygen content, the presence of large coarse grains allowed plastic strain in some cases, and for the samples consolidated at higher temperatures, yield strength of 865 MPa with a 8% total strain were obtained. For the samples with high oxygen content plastic deformation was no possible in any case. The observed stress for both compositions was analysed by two approaches, one based exclusively in grain boundary strengthening and the other one based in two effects acting at the same time: grain boundary and particle strengthening. Whereas grain boundary strengthening seems to fit with the strength of the samples in the nanostructured range, when coarse ferrite grains appear the addition of particle strengthening help to get better results. This indicates that the presence of oxides dissolved inside the large grains reinforce the structure of ball-milled iron.