Latent damage assessment and prognostication of residual life in airborne lead-free electronics under thermo-mechanical loads

Aerospace-electronic systems usually face a very harsh environment, requiring them to survive the high strain rates, e.g. during launch and re-entry and thermal environments including extreme low and high temperatures. Traditional health monitoring methodologies have relied on reactive methods of failure detection often providing little or no insight into the remaining useful life of the system. In this paper, a mathematical approach for interrogation of system state under cyclic thermo-mechanical stresses has been developed for 6-different leadfree solder alloy systems. Data has been collected for leading indicators of failure for alloy systems including, Sn3Ag0.5Cu, Sn3Ag0.7Cu, Sn1Ag0.5Cu, Sn0.3Ag0.5Cu0.1Bi, Sn0.2Ag0.5Cu0.1Bi0.1Ni, 96.5Sn3.5Ag second-level interconnects under the application of cyclic thermo-mechanical loads. Methodology presented resides in the pre-failure space of the system in which no macro-indicators such as cracks or delamination exist. Systems subjected to thermo-mechanical damage have been interrogated for system state and the computed damage state correlated with known imposed damage. The approach involves the use of condition monitoring devices which can be interrogated for damage proxies at finite time-intervals. Interrogation techniques are based on derivation of damage proxies, and system prior damage based non-linear least-squares methods including the Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithm. The systempsilas residual life is computed based on residual-life computation algorithms.