Don, You have already received some good advice from Joe, Brian and Lee. In my opinion, no an ionic cleanliness tester is enough. We have them in all of our facilities. We have not failed a test in 15 years. We continue to do it because our customers what to see some form of cleanliness monitoring. It makes them happy, so it makes us happy. The J-Std-001 approach is one way to do a process qualification. Newer methods are being developed, but may not quite be ready for prime time. If you are manufacturing commercial avionics, as we are, you are probably familiar with the DO-160 document, levied by the FAA. We run those tests whenever we qualify a new product. I would suggest you run ion chromatography, as well as Omegameter, on samples that then are qualified in the DO-160 tests. The humidity tests will be the most telling. If desired, you can take the 10 day worst case humidity test and extend it out. If you are producing military avionics, as we are, then the same approach applies for Mil-Std-883 tests. Doing IC gives you a good idea of what residues are present. The ionic cleanliness tester tells you its metric for the product, which you can then use as a target for process control. The functional tests tell you if those levels of cleanliness are adequate for your product in your end-use environment. Doing it this way means your data is 100% relative. Going the J-STD-001 route you have to interpret how much the lab data approximates real world data. Always an iffy proposition. And Brian, we already established last year that a piece of string is 8.4 cm long. So stop asking that question. Doug Pauls Donald Vischulis <dvischulis@EARTH LINK.NET> To Sent by: TechNet [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> cc Subject 03/09/2006 04:58 [TN] Cleaning Qualification PM Question Please respond to Donald Vischulis <dvischulis@earth link.net> All I've been assigned the task of determining if a supplier's current cleaning process is robust or if additional testing is required to be able to say that the product is clean enough to provide years of field use. The board is a 2-sided Class 3 assembly (95% SMT) with one BGA and about 1500 other components. The assembly is soldered with a water soluble flux, it's cleaned in a batch cleaner with DI water, and is conformal coated. The current manufacturer is using and Omega meter to verify the cleanliness of the board after cleaning. My questions: Is this process good enough to provide a reliable product in an aircraft application? If not what guidance is available to determine what level of process qualification is needed to answer question #1? Any help is really appreciated. Don Vischulis --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 ----------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 -----------------------------------------------------