An Accelerated Degradation Testing Method for Quantifying Lifetime of DC-DC Power Supply

Power supplies are widely used in commercial applications and military. The power supply is always found to be a weak point because its failure can cause a malfunction in the system. The power supply manufacturers often struggle with the conundrum of trying to quantify the lifespan of a power supply. This paper developed an approach to quantify the lifetime of a power supply based on the accelerated degradation test (ADT). The major originalities involve identification of degradation parameters, degradation indictor, end-of-life criterion, and also designing stress loading profile and analyzing degradation data. A case study is given to illustrate the new approach. Experimental results show the mean RMS output voltage of the power supply can be selected as a degradation measuring parameter, the difference between mean RMS voltages measured under two thermal stress levels can be identified as a degradation indictor, and also the proposed ADT method can be used to quantify the lifetime of a power supply within a short period.