Brazing Timeline
YEARS 2000 and Beyond
2000
- Diode laser welding, once limited to compact disks, laser printers, and laser pointers, are now making their way to the manufacturing floor. Welding Type 304 Stainless steel (0.024 inch), Titanium foil (0.005 inch thick) and laser brazing with a silicon-bronze brazing wire.
2001
- Flame brazing 5XXX aluminum alloys using non-corrosive flux.
- Soldering carbon nanotubes using a SEM and the Contamination of the carbon at the interface of the tubes to "solder" an electrical connection.
2002
- Still researching.
2003
- 2nd International Brazing & Soldering Conference is held in San Diego where 80 papers will be presented in three days. The first conference was held 33 years earlier in 1970.
2004
- Still researching.
2005
- Still researching.
2006
- Still researching.
2007
- Still researching.
2008
- Still researching.
2009
- Still researching.
2010
- Still researching.
2011
- Still researching.
2012
- Micro-joining, first developed as a resistance welding process in the early 1950s was applied to the manufacturing of medical appliances for orthodontics. The 1960s saw ultrasonic welding as applied to microelectronics wire bonding for diameters as small as 25-microns [10-4 in.] used for semiconductor chip-level interconnections. But welding posed problematic for engineered carbon nano tubes (CNT), a material used for fabricating Nano-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (NEMS).Welding must be precisely controlled to avoid excessive heat damage or degradation of material properties while making robust structures. At the nano-scale level, the influences of gravitational forces become dominant and make the joining operation difficult. The art of brazing is the primary choice of joining CNT’s and technological improvements in microwave radiation, developed for joining plastics and sintering powder metal components, emerged as Microwave Brazing [2010], a novel nano-joining process. The patentbriefly describes the process as follows: “[S]o that heating of the alloy is selective and sufficient to cause complete melting of the alloy and permit metallurgical bonding…without excessively heating the substrate so as not to degrade the properties of the substrate.” Previously developed processes, vacuum brazing and nanosecond pulsed lasers have also successfully joined CNTs. As a process, Nano-brazing uses a precise amount of braze filler metal which is applied to nano-particles for joining and forming three-dimensional networks of CNT bundles creating nano structures, devices or assemblies. To form these networks, Nanosecond pulsed lasers are applied to gold (Au) nano-particles and to braze platinum (Pt) nano-particles together. Researchers also brazed networked CNTs to a Nickel electrode using a braze filler eutectic composition of Ag-Cu-Ti under a vacuum of 10-6 Torr to form a novel incandescent lamp filament capable of higher light emission with a lower contact resistance.
2013
- Still researching.