Timothy

I have no experience of your particular conditions but I wish to chip in
with a couple of shekels worth.

1) The Ionograph will extract much more than other methods. Whether this
is significant or not under your circumstances is a moot point. You do
not cite the levels of an unexposed PCB.
2) Your chromatograph readings are just one single anion. Unless the
fire involved PVC, I would not expect much contamination increase from
chlorides. You must look at the mix of cations and anions on a before
and after basis, as well as potentially fatal-to-electronics non-ionics
(e.g. carbon, sooty or tarry gunge, etc.).
3) Your maintenance contract probably contained a clause excluding
accidental or deliberate damage of this nature. If so, I would say that
the maintainers are fully justified in, at least, requiring
indemnisation for the fire-related damage, unless you can *prove* that
the cause of the fire was related to their not maintaining the equipment
correctly.
4) No matter what, I would not consider fire damage repair qualified as
routine maintenance.
5) Your fire insurance should cover the cost of repairing the damage,
unless there was some specific exclusion.

Brian

Timothy Cousins wrote:
>
> I have a situation where there has been a small fire in a data center.
>
> There was no water involved in quenching the fire.
>
> The equipment manufacturers are considering walking away from their
> maintenance agreement citing contamination levels in excess of 1.56
> ug/cm2 based on ANSI J-STD-001 rev. B
>
> They have provided an ionograph reading of 3.6ug/cm2 of NaCL
> equivalent on a circuit board as evidence and various swabs of
> exterior surfaces on equipment cases - most in excess of this
> standard.
>
> We have used IPC-TM-650  2.3.28 - Ionic analysis of circuit boards,
> ion chromotography method readings and recorded:
>
>         Uninvolved Circuit board:         0.25 Chloride ug/cm2
>
>         Involved Circuit Board:                0.28 Chloride ug/ cm2
>
> The J-STD is a post solder cleanliness standard. It is being used
> inappropriately as a benchmark in situations it was never designed for
> and for a methodology that has an ionic extraction yield greatly more
> efficient than the methodology cited in the standard.
>
> q1)  Can anyone provide me with references to reliabilty studies of
> electronic equipment contaminated by fire combustion products.
>
> q2) Any thoughts and insights into the appropriate/inappropriate use
> of the J-STD under these circumstances.
>
> q3) Why am I finding such a great discrepancy in the reported results.
>
> Timothy Cousins

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