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Prognostic health monitoring technologies for power electronic systems assess their performance degradation, load histories, and degrees of fatigue in order to increase maintenance effectiveness, reliability design methods, and equipment availability under conditions of actual use. To improve reliability and reduce downtime, prediction of reliability in terms of thermal fatigue life under field conditions is important, as is the use of load and health monitoring data from the field in cases of performance degradation during use, maintenance, and field failure. The fatigue life of solder joints is also affected by whether the load history waveform is symmetric or asymmetric. In this paper, we propose a novel health monitoring method for thermal fatigue failure corresponding to time-dependent inelastic strain response, such as in asymmetric cycles, by use of a surrogate model obtained by a finite element method-based thermal stress simulation. We applied this method to an insulated-gate bipolar transistor power module capable of monitoring module temperature, electrical performance, and number of revolutions of the cooling fan. With the proposed method, inelastic strain cycles and thermal fatigue life distribution of solder joints could be estimated from their temperature monitoring history. The method was judged to be useful for assessing thermal load histories and estimating thermal fatigue life in prognostic health monitoring.

A quench is the transition from a superconducting state to a normal conducting state. Elucidating the mechanism of quenching caused by mechanical disturbances (training quench) requires a detailed understanding of the stress state in the coil during excitation. In this study, we developed a large-scale analysis method that can precisely analyze where strain energy is concentrated and loss energy is generated due to thermal stress and electromagnetic force in superconducting coils by considering the detailed structure of superconducting wires and the wire alignment disorder caused by constraints during winding. The results showed that strain energy in the resin is concentrated in the region of overlap between the strain energy distribution caused by the macroscopic deformation of the coil and the geometrically inhomogeneous region, including the wire transfer zone. Furthermore, comparative verification using acoustic emission measurements to determine damage locations suggests that quench is also concentrated at the transfer zone in the actual coil, thus demonstrating the validity of the analysis. A sub-model of the area around the transfer zone, which was found in the large-scale analysis, was created, and crack propagation analysis was conducted using the phase-field method. Crack propagation in the resin and increased deformation of the wire due to weakening of the supporting rigidity of the wire caused by the crack propagation were observed.

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There is high demand for fatigue life prediction of solder joints in electronic packages such as ball grid arrays (BGAs). A key component of fatigue life prediction technology is a canary device, which warns of the impending risk of failure through loss of function before other important parts become severely impaired. In a BGA package, thermal fatigue of solder joints normally starts from the solder joints at the outermost part of the package. This can be taken advantage of by using the outermost solder joints as canary devices for detecting the degree of cumulative mechanical fatigue damage. To accurately estimate the lifetimes of other functional solder joints, it is essential to understand the relationship between the fatigue lives of canary joints and other functional joints. Damage path simulation is therefore proposed for predicting the crack propagation in solder joints on electronic packages through numerical simulation. During the process of designing the layout of canary joints and other joints, it is very useful to know not only the relationship between the fatigue lives of the canary and other joints, but also the path of crack propagation through all joints. This paper presents a method for estimating the relationship between the fatigue lives of canary joints and other joints by using damage path simulation. Some BGA packages mounted on a printed circuit board are modeled to demonstrate the process of estimating the lifetime of each joint under thermal cycle loading. A large-scale finite element model is used to accurately represent the geometrical properties of the printed circuit board and package. Both crack initiation and crack propagation processes can be simultaneously evaluated by modeling all of the solder joints on each package. The results show that damage path simulation and large-scale modeling are useful for determining the layout of canary joints in electronic packages.