A concept for monitoring the failure risk of a power electronic component using a surrogate model

Power electronic components play a major role in many industries with applications in automotive, aerospace, and railway transportation. With the increasing demand, reliability and efficiency constraints from the growth in lifetime expectation and safety requirements are major challenges for these devices.Thermal aging is a common phenomenon that occurs in power electronic modules during operation. It is caused by the differences in thermal expansion between the materials during the unavoidable thermal cycles. Ultimately, it leads to failure. One common failure mode is the formation and propagation of cracks in the interconnecting solder layer between the die and the substrate. It is known as delamination. This paper proposes a concept for active health management. Once the onset of delamination is detected, its propagation is monitored using a surrogate model, and the risk of module failure is minimized by an effective reduction of the stressing conditions for the affected module while keeping the performance of the overall system as high as possible so that the mission can be completed as planned.