Malfunction detection monitoring the power supply current

The need of detecting susceptibilities at their onset is a fundamental issue if one wants to perform meaningful immunity tests on equipment and systems. Susceptibilities are often obscured by noise and in many cases it is difficult to discriminate situations of actual malfunction with the minimum risk of making detection errors. This paper tries to give an answer to this problem with a procedure commonly used in statistical signal processing theory. In this context a new method to detect malfunctions based upon the monitoring of the power supply current absorption is illustrated.