BigEd....lead was added to tin solder in the early 1900's to prevent the formation of tin whiskers.
Leaded solder connections do corrode when exposed to active elements, but that is not the same as tin whiskers. This corrosion can be reduced/prevented with the use of conformal coatings.
Tests with lead content vs whisker formation indicates that as little as 3% lead will prevent the formation of tin whiskers.
If the recylcing rate on consumer electronics approached that of car batteries, none of this would be necessary. All we have to do is implement a $15 core charge on every consumer electronics item, maybe $150 on every commercial electronics good. Instead, we ship it all to Nigeria ( or China or Vietnam) & let them extract the metals.
We all make mistakes.ROHS was one of them. It cost billions of dollars in losses, equipment and defective products.As for military , I cannot give the name of a document, but in April this year all of military products have been taken off the ROHS requirement. There may be some electro - mechanical assemblies of high power ,that still "linger" , but are on the way out.Car batteries are the highest concentration of lead in the environment, so stupid solder on PC board does not even matter.Needle in a stack! We all have to be realistic about this and Toyota cover-up was just a lie.
"Several Years" doesn't quite cut it. Many military systems have to last for decades and have life or death consequences. Military systems must also endure really "bad" environments i.e. salt water, jungle humidity and heat among others.
I find it ironic that Grassley and his cohorts pretend to know about EVERYTHING. They allow Brussels (the EU) to dictate what the world does and then get all upset when things go to hell. They then start demanding explanations from people that they forced to comply to their previous bad decisions.
Agreed and good viewpoints to know. I don't really like the idea of not having a 'hard key' ignition. When I run my current rides to death, I will install a manual kill on whatever I get. I usually get 200K+ out of a car though, an EStop if you will :-)
"Tin Whiskers" were trouble makers before "Lead-Free". Advoidance approaches are well known- cleanliness, use of conformal coatings, physical seperation of critical points, etc. In addition, the method of using two sensors with different outputs on the petal and using logic in the receiving device gives additional assurance of being able to detect a failure and taking corrective action.
If all of the trouble advoidance procedures generally used with critical electronic controls are implemented, the failure is more probably a result of operator error or physical hardware failure.
Last but not least is the very high probability that the driver may have pressed the brake and the accelerator simultaneously. Todays cars have the foot area so compact that drivers like myself (14EEE shoes) and women wearing heals cannot insure that they activate only the brake pedal.
Note: Lead-Free electronics are generally banned from aircraft/spacecraft applications because of the supposedly possibility of tin whiskers. LeadFree is not generally banned for other military applications and has been used for several years very sucessfully.
That mostly occurred AFAIK in stannous tin plating of surfaces. The cure was to up the lead content. I may be wrong but thanks for adding. Related: I purchased an industrial PlasmaCutter a few years back and found it was DOA due to HyperTherm switching the assembly line over to rohs solder and components. The higher solder temps warped assemblies. They fixed it under warranty and it works fine. thx -Lee
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