Long-time behaviour of soldered plastics

For short-time temperature stress as applied during soldering of MIDs there are no reliable temperature limits of plastics available. It is supposed, that many 3D-MID-applications are feasible with less thermally stable and cheaper plastics such as PA, PET, PP and ABS. According to investigations heat deflection and physical ageing of plastics have a great influence an solderability of plastics. The physical ageing of polymers depends on their thermal pretreatment (processing) and determines most of the changes of the mechanical properties. The solderability of plastics is not only a material specific change of the short-time properties, it also depends on processing. The long time behaviour, which is determined mainly by chemical ageing is only scarcely influenced by soldering.