Damage Model for Reliability Assessment of Solder Joints in Wind Turbines

Electrical components are inseparable part in many products. The environment, under which the electrical components are utilized, directly influences the reliability of electrical components. Such influences might be loads and stresses from turbulence, temperature, humidity and many other environmental factors. Reliability assessment for such type of products conventionally is performed by classical reliability techniques based on test data. Usually conventional reliability approaches are time and resource consuming activities. Thus in this paper we choose a physics of failure approach to define damage model by Miner’s rule. Our attention is focused on crack propagation in solder joints of electrical components due to the temperature loadings. Based on the proposed method it is described how to find the damage level for a given temperature loading profile. The proposed method is discussed for the application at Wind Turbines electrical components reliability assessment.