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Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

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Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#91

Post by cinntaile »

hulitu wrote: post #80
nomel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes waste reduction is the goal, rather than lead reduction. With toxic, intelligence reducing [1], materials like lead, maybe some extra waste is a perfectly good trade off. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600539

Last i checked tin was not an edible material. There is a small difference between having tin dust, which you cannot contain, and having electronics containing lead which you can colect and store in a warehouse ( asuming you want to address the problem in the first place).

Are you saying that electronics devices continuously let out tin dust so we end up breathing in this stuff?

Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#92

Post by rootusrootus »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #60

It really is an amazing phenomena. Effectively atoms of tin are moving from the tin out to the end of the whisker. We spent a week talking about whiskering(sp?) in my materials science class at USC because it was such a big deal in the EE world. Prior to that class my world view was that only electrons could travel through metal, only to find that metal can travel through metal too! Locally at NASA Ames they had an e…

> Effectively atoms of tin are moving from the tin out to the end of the whisker.

Don't tin whiskers get built from the base up, though? So the tip was the first thing built, and just gets pushed farther away.

Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#93

Post by kimixa »

at_a_remove wrote: post #47
xmodem wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The boiling point of water is 100 °C, and yet my shower seems to produce an awful lot of steam despite not being anywhere close to that.

You have confused steam with small water droplets, akin to what emerges from an ultrasonic mister. If it were steam, you would be shrieking and then dead.

I thought everyone did the experiment of leaving a saucer of water out and seeing it evaporates over time, despite being significantly lower than 100c.

And "Steam" is wooly term for high enough density of water vapor that you see condensation - often caused by higher temperatures in the majority of cases people experience it in day to day life. So it doesn't really have a precise definition. At what temperature point does "mist" become "steam?" What %age of the volume of air needs to be water vapor? If you lowered the pressure water "boils" at a lower temperature - is that still steam?

Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#94

Post by jpindar »

deathanatos wrote: post #71
at_a_remove wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have confused steam with small water droplets, akin to what emerges from an ultrasonic mister. If it were steam, you would be shrieking and then dead.

But it's still water, and it's still moving up and about of its own accord in the local air which is the point. That it isn't technically steam doesn't disprove the point the person you're responding to is trying to make… The commenter's point isn't that the lead has technically been boiled, it's that, if we analogize to "steam" in a shower, I don't have to reach water's boiling point before I'm breathing in water. D…

No, soldering doesn't send streams of liquid solder through the air. And if an occasional drip of solder does splash, it is so heavy, and has so much surface tension, that it doesn't go far and doesn't stay in the air like water droplets do.

Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#95

Post by alar44 »

Steltek wrote: post #23
dmitrygr wrote: post #4

Use lead solder, like NASA does: easier to use, and no whisker issues. Just wash your hands afterwards

On the contrary, I am not NASA. I'm not even a consumer electronics company. I'm a hobbyist at home, soldering things at my desk or table. Lead-free is the least of my problems when building something and I don't believe "just wash your hands" is sufficient for cleaning my workspace (or kitchen table?) of possible lead contamination.

It definitely is enough. I don't know where the myth that looking at lead kills you started, but unless you are eating it or breathing it in (soldering is not hot enough to vaporize lead) there's nothing to worry about.

Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#96

Post by trhway »

mrob wrote: post #88
foldr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is not to end up inhaling or eating the solder in its solid state. This is actually quite difficult to avoid, as cleaning the tip of your iron will create lots of tiny solder balls that fly everywhere and can persist in your environment. Personally I would say that in hobbyist electronics tin whiskers are the least of your concerns when it comes to the reliability of the devices you’re making. I wouldn’t ri…

Agreed. This, not lead fumes, is the real danger of leaded solder. You can't hand solder reliably without cleaning the iron, but both of the common cleaning techniques (damp sponge and brass wool) inevitably break the soldier into tiny balls, which bounce and roll all over the place. They can get caught in clothes, and from there they might end up getting into food. With the safe dose for lead being zero, I don't thi…

During my elementary school years (beginning of 198x USSR) the lead was a go to material for a lot of things - using campfires we melted the lead out of Navy cables and batteries (from the Navy dumps), no gloves, no masks, and made a lot of things out of it - toy action figures/soldiers for example, weights and weighted hooks for fishing, bullets for DYI guns, gear for some games, etc. (I'm a drop-out from PhD. program at a top Russian Math school - didn't see money in it and thus went into programming, so i guess the few IQ points i lost due to lead (i score usually about 130) is what caused such poor judgement :)

Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#97

Post by voakbasda »

tejohnso wrote: post #39

This is very surprising to me. I had no idea that certain conductors had some kind of (stochastic, according to robomartin) built-in time delayed short circuit mechanism that will, without question, manifest itself given enough time. Like some kind of natural electronics prank.

If you were feeling particularly cynical, you might wonder whether this phenomenon has been incorporated into shipping products, such manufacturers would be assured that their goods would fail shortly after the warranty expired.

Re: Tin whiskers: What happens when they spontaneously erupt? (2018)

#98

Post by foldr »

trhway wrote: post #96
mrob wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This, not lead fumes, is the real danger of leaded solder. You can't hand solder reliably without cleaning the iron, but both of the common cleaning techniques (damp sponge and brass wool) inevitably break the soldier into tiny balls, which bounce and roll all over the place. They can get caught in clothes, and from there they might end up getting into food. With the safe dose for lead being zero, I don't thi…

During my elementary school years (beginning of 198x USSR) the lead was a go to material for a lot of things - using campfires we melted the lead out of Navy cables and batteries (from the Navy dumps), no gloves, no masks, and made a lot of things out of it - toy action figures/soldiers for example, weights and weighted hooks for fishing, bullets for DYI guns, gear for some games, etc. (I'm a drop-out from PhD. progr…

None of those activities pose the same risks as soldering using leaded solder, for the reasons given above. You are unlikely to end up ingesting significant quantities of the lead.

It's probably worth emphasizing that this is risk with home soldering, where you're likely to eat and solder in relatively close proximity, and without being completely rigorous about changing your clothes and vacuuming up every last spec of dust.

Lead free solder works fine, so there is really no reason to take even a small risk if you are soldering as a hobbyist.

(And yeah, it's probably a small risk. By all means use leaded solder if you think the slight additional convenience outweighs the small risk of significant lead exposure.)

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