• DocumentCode
    163521
  • Title

    Are amps and volts created equal?

  • Author

    Tornquist, Gary

  • Author_Institution
    Product Safety, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA
  • fYear
    2014
  • fDate
    5-7 May 2014
  • Firstpage
    68
  • Lastpage
    71
  • Abstract
    This paper briefly reviews the way current IT and consumer electronics safety standards treat the risk of electrically caused fire is purely proportional to power. That implies it is symmetrical in regards to available voltage and current. It then proposes a simple general model to divide electrical failure modes that may be fire risks into two distinct types series and parallel resistive faults. It considers the relative merits of real inductors and capacitors as energy storage devices. Then it looks at some real world high voltage and high current electrical sources and failure modes, and finally argues based on the previous points that the available voltage is a greater risk factor than the available current.
  • Keywords
    electrical faults; electrical safety; fires; available current; available voltage; consumer electronics safety standard; electrical failure; electrically caused fire; fire risks; parallel resistive fault; series resistive fault; Wires; ampere; fire; ignition; model; power; safety; volt;
  • fLanguage
    English
  • Publisher
    ieee
  • Conference_Titel
    Product Compliance Engineering (ISPCE), 2014 IEEE Symposium on
  • Conference_Location
    San Jose, CA
  • Print_ISBN
    978-1-4799-5682-1
  • Type

    conf

  • DOI
    10.1109/ISPCE.2014.6842004
  • Filename
    6842004