Mechanical behavior of solder joints under dynamic four-point impact bending

Reliability of solder joints under drop impact loading is important to mobile electronic products. In this paper, dynamic four-point impact bending tests of board level electronic packages are carried out to investigate mechanical behavior of solder joints. In the test, strain gauges, a high speed camera and the digital image correlation method are used to acquire strain and deflection of the printed circuit board (PCB). After validated by the test data, a finite element model of the dynamic four-point impact bending test is used to obtain strain and stress in the solder joints. Then, failure predictions of the solder joints are made by strain index, and the predictions are compared with the experimental observations. Furthermore, a strain rate dependent Johnson-Cook material model and rate independent elastic-plastic model of lead-free solder are used to investigate the effect of strain rate on behavior of solder joints under drop impact loading. We find that the material model has insignificant influence on the deflection of the PCB during the drop impact but severely affect the stress and strain in solder joints. The rate independent elastic-plastic solder material model always underestimates the stress and overestimates the strain of the solder joints. The index of equivalent plastic strain computed by the strain rate dependent Johnson-Cook model can predict more realistic failure behavior of the solder joints.