Packaging: "Taking a Bearing on Quality"
S.W. (Alex) Ng, Senior CAE Engineer - ASM Assembly Automation Ltd of Hong Kong.
ASM Assembly Automation Ltd of Hong Kong uses porous air bearings for the design and manufacture of its electronic-assembly and packaging equipment. Rather than rely on commercial bearings, the company manufactures its own to meet very specific operating requirements.
"The model interface between the air film and bearing surface has a non-standard boundary condition that involves a partial differential equation," explains S.W. (Alex) Ng, a senior CAE engineer. Ng tried to model this type of bearing with existing tools on hand but was unsuccessful because of the PDE that plays such an important role and yet is difficult to solve numerically.
He then searched for a package that could handle the job and finally found COMSOL Multiphysics, the only one that let him work with nonstandard boundary conditions.