Continue the automatic cleaning process after an interruption at the termination point or not?
And why do kolb systems insist on restarting after a process interruption?

If a cleaning process is interrupted (e.g. due to a massive malfunction or manual intervention), it can be assumed that in almost all such cases it will take from at least 10 to a maximum of 90 minutes until the reason for the interruption is eliminated. Why it is not a good idea for the cleaning system to continue the process at the termination point is relatively easy to explain. The most important reason: the cleaning good logically changes its condition during the stoppage time. For example, cleaning or rinsing liquid or contamination that has already been removed has dried on again, or (especially in the case of high-temperature cleaning) the cleaning items have cooled down.

This means that if the process is continued at the interruption point, the preferably optimally coordinated cleaning window is no longer guaranteed - and thus also no reliable cleanliness of the cleaning goods at the end of the process. This can lead to significant quality losses in products (e.g. assemblies) or precision losses in tools (e.g. stencils, squeegees, filters, etc.).

A second reason is: A cleaning system cannot detect whether the loading was changed during an interruption phase. For example, were additional assemblies loaded or was a partially cleaned stencil removed (and finally cleaned by hand) and an uncleaned stencil loaded?

In order to avoid such, possibly very costly errors, electronics cleaning systems should therefore always restart the process after an abort! For this reason, the control option of allowing the process to continue at the abort point is deliberately excluded in kolb systems, as it is in principle only a source of error.

In order to nevertheless achieve the greatest possible process time efficiency, kolb cleaning systems distinguish precisely between warnings and errors.

In the event of a warning (e.g. "Change filter"), the system recognizes that there is no threat to the reproducible cleaning result and allows the process to proceed to the end.

In the event of a malfunction, i.e., a hazard to the system, the cleaning goods, or even people and / or the environment, or due to a decision by the operator, the system aborts the process and, for the above reasons, must then restart it.