Reliability Assessment of Metallized Film Capacitors using Reduced Degradation Test Sample

Metallized film capacitor is a type of product with a long lifetime and high reliability. It is difficult to assess the lifetime and reliability using the traditional statistical inference method which is based on the large number of testing data. This paper presents a new testing methodology, called T-performance degradation test, by dividing the test process into several stages. In each stage, the sample size of working capacitors under test decreases stage by stage until the test lasts enough time with few survival capacitors. Leveraging the T-performance degradation data, this paper further presents a reliability assessment model to predict the lifetime of the high-performance capacitors. Finally, the reliability assessment model is demonstrated on a type of high-performance metallized film capacitors used in the energy module of the laser facility. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.