Lifetime Prediction of the Film Capacitor based on Early Degradation Information

Long-term reliability testing time of power electronic components (e.g., film capacitors) entails delayed feedback of their performance, often many months to years, which has been one of critical limitations for accelerating power electronic technology development. In this paper, we explore a method to reduce the reliability testing time by exploiting capacitor’s early-degradation information. In contrast to the conventional testing methods based on end-of-life (EOL) data alone, the proposed method makes more use of early degradation information in the reliability testing. The proposed method can predict the EOL lifetime of the film capacitor with 2.5% degradation testing only. The maximum error of the predicted result is less than 5% error compared to the conventional test-to-fail method. The proposed work serves as a first step to reduce the reliability testing time and accelerate the technology development of power electronics.