An NDSU engineering professor and a recent graduate student received an award for their research paper on the predictive modeling of solder joint life. Om Prakash Yadav, professor and interim chair of industrial and manufacturing engineering, and Gurmukh Advani, MS ’14, industrial engineering and management, received the Institute of Industrial Engineers Golomski Award at the 2015 Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. 

Yadav and Advani, who works at John Deere Electronic Solutions, presented the paper, titled “A Unified Model Approach for Solder Joint Life Prediction,” at the symposium held Jan. 26-29 in Tampa, Florida. The award is presented by the Quality Control and Reliability Engineering division of the Institute of Industrial Engineers for an outstanding paper.

The research focuses on developing a more realistic reliability prediction model by capturing degradation behavior of solder joints. The underlying thermo-mechanical physics of failure mechanisms responsible for degradation are used to develop the constitutive models separately for initiation and propagation phases.

The models are then combined to come up with a unified life prediction model for solder joints. Due to the complex nature of degradation in initiation and propagation phases, non-linear regression methods have been used to estimate the model parameters. The resulting models are used to predict the total estimated lifetime of solder joints using crack initiation and crack propagation models on the dataset from a given study.

The focus of the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium is to educate and create awareness that reliability is not just an attribute to be measured; it must be engineered into products to provide an objective justification for customer confidence.

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