Technical Tidbits Archive:2008-2011

Learn why nickel is a fantastic choice for an undercoating layer below tin or precious metal top layer coatings.

Investigate the potentially damaging effects of creep corrosion and pore corrosion, and what can be done to mitigate them to preserve good electrical contact.

See how nickel has many advantages for increasing durability of your connectors, and some potential shortcomings that could cause reliability problems.

Examine fretting corrosion, and why it is particularly a concern for you if your contacts are tin-coated.

Learn why tin is used nearly everywhere in low cost connector designs, and the potential problems with tin that you need to take care to avoid.

Introduce yourself to the different ways that electrical contacts are coated, and what design considerations must be taken into account for each.

Examine the advantages of contacts made with rectangular cross sections over those with circular cross sections.

Compare and contrast the manufacturing of contact made from strip and wire, and learn about the advantages and disadvantages of each product form.

Examine how the directionality inherent in certain materials can create unexpected failures in your part, unless it is considered in the design process.

Introduce yourself to the tensile test, and learn why it is probably the single most informative test you can perform on a material.

Investigate all the different ways hardness testing can go wrong, so you can avoid them and be confident in your measurements.

Review the concepts of hardness and learn how to ensure accuracy and repeatability in hardness testing.

Investigate how to determine the maximum amount of current that your connector design can safely carry.

Learn how to estimate (and minimize) the temperature rise caused by joule heating in your connector.

See why the little-known properties of elastic resilience and the modulus of resilience give the best indication of performance and reliability for any spring design.

Read how the insights from cantilever beam theory can greatly improve your connector designs.

See why the cantilever beam makes a good model for electrical contacts in connectors.

Review the methods used to strengthen metals, and determine how they work together to create the optimum combination of properties.

Read about the various heat treatments that are used to greatly improve the strength of copper alloys, without hindering conductivity or formability.

See how cold work is used to increase the strength and hardness of metals, and why too much is not a good thing.

Find out how various alloying elements improve the strength of copper, and thus the reliability of your designs.

Learn how the performance of a material can be improved by refining its grain size.

Discover what really happens on a microscopic scale when you exceed the strength of your material, and how that knowledge is used to make stronger materials.

Explore the factors that determine how much your design will gradually lose reliability, and learn to guard against them.

Discover the similarities and difference between stress relaxation and creep, and how knowledge of them can improve your connector designs.

Find out what you can do to minimize springback when forming parts, or at least how to account for it to keep your parts within tolerance.

Explore how formability determined by bend testing can actually vary signficantly from actual production forming, and what you can do about it.

Familiarize yourself with how material formability is determined by bend testing, and how to apply the results so you are not blindsided by forming problems.

See how the typical, acceptable variations in geometry and material properties can interact and lead to unacceptable variation in the final part.

Find out how small but allowable variations in geometry and properties can make a nominally good part fail.

Find out why contact force is the most important connector design variable, and what you can do to ensure reliability throughout your connector's life.

Determine what you need to do to ensure that your connector works as well at the end of its intended life as it does in the beginning.

Explore how residual forming stresses can reduce the reliability of your connectors, unless they are taken into account early in the design stage.

Discover which material properties allow you to reduce the size of your contacts, saving space and raw material costs, while increasing reliability.

Read how designing to the yield strength of your material may not be enough to ensure reliability.

Learn which material properties will allow your connectors to survive repeated drops or other shock loads.