Interview
Interview—Michael Konrad,
Aqueous Technologies
For twenty-five years, Aqueous Technologies has focused on one aspect of electronics manufacturing and one
aspect only: cleaning. The expertise shows—the company has won more than thirty industry awards for its
products. We recently caught up with president and founder Michael Konrad to discuss the resurgence of
cleaning in the electronics manufacturing industry.
Mike, you are the president of Aqueous
Technologies, a manufacturer of
automated defluxing equipment. How did
you get into this business?
Actually, next year marks my twenty-fifth
anniversary in this industry. I began my
career in this industry in 1985. I developed
one of the industry’s first batch-format
automated defluxing systems. This was in
response to the Montreal Protocol whereby
most popular cleaning solvents were to be
phased out. In 1992, I founded Aqueous
Technologies, a manufacturer of automated
defluxing equipment, ionic contamination
(cleanliness) testers and stencil cleaning
equipment.
A lot has changed in the electronics
industry in the past twenty-five years.
How has this affected your business?
It’s ironic, the more things change, the
more they stay the same. Back in 1985,
virtually all electronic manufacturers
performed a defluxing process after the
assemblies were soldered. You stuffed the
board, soldered it and then cleaned it. This
represented the conventional wisdom of
the day. Soon after 1989, as a result of the
Montreal Protocol, the two major defluxing
solvents (Freon TMS and 111 Trichloroeth-
ene) were banned from production, causing
the industry to turn to no-clean fluxes.
With the exception of military and other
high reliability applications, the process
of removing flux from circuit assemblies
practically died. Today, due to the effects of
miniaturization, higher reflow temperature
profiles, and increased reliability expec-
tations, the industry is turning back to
defluxing. The military, medical and other
high reliability manufactures never stopped
36 – Global SMT & Packaging – October 2009
www.globalsmt.net
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