A new generation of soldering facility for small to medium-sized European electronics enterprises has been designed, prototyped, and investigated in a collaborative effort by a number of European manufacturers and research groups. The prototyped soldering cell was designed to improve the agility of small electronics manufacturers to cope with the growing demand for lower-volume batches of highly mixed product varieties.
The proposed flexible soldering cell comprises a number of advanced soldering ovens and a materials handling system. The present paper describes the design specifications and implementation of a three-dimensional virtual engineering environment developed to support system and production engineers during the design, test, and validation phases of various cell control and hardware configurations, by enabling the simulation of a virtual cell‘s response to a range of production scenarios.
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