This article reports on preliminary results of a study conducted to examine how temporary electrical overstress seed fault conditions in discrete power electronic components that cannot be detected with reliability tests but impact longevity of the device. These defects do not result in formal parametric failures per datasheet specifications, but result in substantial change in the electrical characteristics when compared with pristine device parameters. Tests were carried out on commercially available 600V IGBT devices using transmission line pulse (TLP) and system level ESD stress.

Understanding aging mechanisms of electronic components is of extreme importance in the aerospace domain where they are part of numerous critical subsystems including avionics. In particular, power MOSFETs are of special interest as they are involved in high voltage switching circuits such as drivers for electrical motors. With increased use of electronics in aircraft control, it becomes more important to understand the degradation of these components in aircraft specific environments.

Lightning induced damage is one of the major concerns in aircraft health monitoring. Such short-duration high voltages can cause significant damage to electronic devices. This paper presents a study on the effects of lightning injection on power metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs). This approach consisted of pininjecting lightning waveforms into the gate, drain and/or source of MOSFET devices while they were in the OFF-state.

This paper proposes a model based approach for prognosis of DC-DC power converters. We briefly review the prognosis process, and present an overview of different approaches that have been developed. We study the effects of capacitor degradation on DC-DC converter performance by developing a combination of a thermal model for ripple current effects and a physics of failure model of the thermal effects on capacitor degradation. The derived degradation model of the capacitor is reintroduced into the DC-DC converter model to study changes in the system performance using Monte Carlo methods.

Differential protection is a popular method to protect aircraft generators against winding faults. Traditional relay-based systems have a limited capability to distinguish between differential current resulting from a winding fault, and the one resulting from measurement noise or current saturation, resulting in false alarms and unnecessary equipment shutdown. Modern aircraft generators are monitored and controlled by advanced generator control units, and therefore, sophisticated signal processing algorithms can be implemented to enhance the differential protection performance.