Enhanced Markovian model with physics of failures for Long-term reliability analysis of electrical systems

The reliability of electrical systems on modern vehicles has an increasing impact on the on-road safety with then increase of smart technology implementations. These electrical systems help detecting dangerous driver behaviors, alleviate driving errors, prevent unintended actions, as well as provide alternatives to internal combustion engines. The goals of having more efficient and safer vehicles could be undermined by the low reliability of electrical systems at severe driving environment. While the standard Markovian model helps understand the reliability of a complex system, the physics of failure (PoF) model provides a more clear relations between environmental disturbances and the corresponding fault conditions. Therefore in this research, we propose an enhanced Markovian model that use PoF to assess the environmental impacts on component level and then to investigate how these uncertainties propagate toward the whole system. Both thermal and vibration are considered and the effects on the solder joint and on the components are modeled in the PoF analysis. The effective of the proposed method is demonstrated on a boost converter. Long-term reliability via the enhanced Markovian model can be used as a design aide in the development stage.