Solder is the conductive metal glue that one uses to stick components together. If you get the component and the PCB hot enough, and melt a little solder in the joint, it will stay put and conduct reliably. But it’s far from simple.

There are many different solder alloys, and even the tip of the soldering iron itself is a multi-material masterpiece. In this article, we’ll take a look at the metallurgy behind soldering, and you’ll see why soldering tip maintenance, and regular replacement, is a good idea. Naturally, we’ll also touch upon the role that lead plays in solder alloys, and what the effect is of replacing it with other metals when going lead-free. What are you soldering with?

Intermetallic Compounds

Soldering, and its higher temperature cousin, brazing, are one of essentially two ways create metal-to-metal bonds, and they allow the use of low-temperature techniques that still create relatively stable bonds between two metal surfaces. Soldering is also an interesting chapter in the field of metallurgy, on account of it being based around so-called intermetallic compounds (IMCs).

Welding stands in contrast to soldering, where high temperatures melt the metal on both sides of the pieces that are being joined, permanently fusing them. Welding is a high-strength, high-reliability way of joining metal pieces, but is unfortunately wholly unsuited for delicate electronics where excess heat can damage parts and the goal is more to ‘glue’ electrically conducting elements together than to melt them together.

This also leads us to the reason why soldering and IMCs are such a source of trouble, to the point where IMCs are referred to as ‘evil’. IMCs are essentially bits of the two metal surfaces on either side dissolved into the solder, causing enough of a joining that each side of the joint is more or less stably fused with the solder. Unfortunately such an IMC is a far cry from the stable solid metal of a welding joint, and as a result can be brittle depending on exactly which metals were involved in the solder alloy.

But the IMCs formed in soldering are strong enough, and their formation is at the root of why every solder alloy uses tin. Tin has the property that it is very good at letting other metals dissolve into it. In fact, it’s possible to solder with pure tin, although as we’ll see below, most solder is improved by adding other metals into the mix.

via The Fascinating World Of Solder Alloys And Metallurgy — Hackaday