Investigation of Wall-slip Behavior in Lead-free Solder Pastes and Isotropic Conductive Adhesives

Wall-slip plays an important role in characterising the flow behaviour of solder paste materials. The wall slip arises due to the various attractive and repulsive forces acting between the solder particles and the walls of the measuring geometry. These interactions could lead to the presence of a thin solvent layer adjacent to the wall, which gives rise to slippage. The wall slip effect can play an important role in ensure successful paste release after the printing process. Wall-slip plays an important role in characterising the flow behaviour of solder pastes and isotropic conductive adhesives. The study investigates the wall-slip formation in solder paste and isotropic conductive adhesives using flow visualisation technique. The slip distance was measured for parallel plate with different surface roughness in order to quantify the wall-slip formations in these paste materials. An ink marker line was drawn between the parallel plate and the free surface of the sample. The parallel was rotated slowly at a constant shear rate of 0.05 sec(-1) and the displacement of the ink marker was observed using a video microscope and image capturing software was utilised to capture the displacement of ink marker. From this study, it was found that the wall-slip effect was evident in all the paste materials. In addition, the different surface roughness of the parallel plates did not prevent the formation of wall-slip. This study has revealed that the wall-slip effect could used to understand the flow behaviour of the paste in the stencil printing process.