Reliability Analyzes of Power Electronics Encapsulations using (Electrochemical) Impedance Spectroscopy - a first approach

Power electronic devices are widely used in industrial drives, electrical grid electronics and electric vehicles under harsh environmental conditions. Therefore, corrosion protection of all active components is necessary to guaranty a long lifetime and reliability. Especially, the influence of humidity on encapsulation materials and consequently their water uptake are critical processes which needs to be characterized and correlated to degradation processes. Therefore, Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy can be a suitable investigation method, which should be investigated in this work. First results show a promising approach to characterize the state of health of encapsulation material using the impedance spectroscopy. In this paper, the authors present experimental setups to demonstrate the possibility of in-situ measurements on encapsulated ceramic power substrates.