Swelling and solvent uptake kinetic in electronic polymer encapsulations – Coupling PC-SAFT with Maxwell-Stefan approach

Various resins are commonly used for encapsulating electronic components across diverse applications, having the joint goal to prevent electronics to be contaminated with solvents from the environment. To mitigate the need for time-intensive experimental studies to analyses their long-term performance in terms of solvent uptake and swelling, computational simulations offer a promising path. This work presents a modeling approach where PC-SAFT (Perturbed Chain Statistical Associating Fluid Theory) is combined with the Maxwell-Stefan framework for simulating the solvent uptake and swelling behavior of silicone, polyurethane, and phenolic resins in various mixtures. The simulation-based results are validated via solvent uptake experiments, where the following solvents, water, heptane, isopropanol, methanol, and acetone are investigated. It turned out, that an excellent agreement between experimental solvent uptake data and simulation-based prediction occurred, which supports the strength of coupling PC-SAFT with Maxwell-Stefan framework for enhanced.